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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24547753">Tremors</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azurite/pseuds/Azurite'>Azurite</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Yu-Gi-Oh! Duel Monsters (Anime &amp; Manga)</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>30kisses #27: overflow, Community: 30kisses, F/M, Inspired by Real Events, Natural Disasters, Post-Canon</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>In-Progress</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-06-05</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-09-20</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 01:00:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>29,692</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24547753</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Azurite/pseuds/Azurite</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>It had been six minutes.</p><p>Only six minutes.</p><p>But in that time, the world came crashing down around Anzu Mazaki. It would have taken her with it, had her chemistry lab partner Seto Kaiba not saved her...again.</p><p>'Why does he care? Since when does he care?'</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Kaiba Seto/Mazaki Anzu | Tea Gardner</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>15</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>48</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Collections:</b></td><td>30kisses Original List, Azure Week 2020</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>1. Shift</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Rated T mostly for language.</p><p>Eventual Azureshipping (Seto Kaiba x Anzu Mazaki)</p><p>For the 30kisses community on LiveJournal (R.I.P. - I might have a Permanent Account and the community still exists, but post-Strikethrough, LJ is dead to me) theme #27 “overflow.” I’m not entirely sure what my thought process was, associating this story with “overflow,” but I think it could be related to a number of things, and some of them might not have featured in this chapter. Tell me whether you think this chapter features the theme in any way.</p><p>Disclaimer: I don’t own Yu-Gi-Oh! This work is purely for entertainment, and is not for profit. And you know the wonderful thing about fair use? This doesn’t detract from the wonderful world of Yu-Gi-Oh! in any way.</p>
    </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>Anzu Mazaki did not consider herself magically gifted by any means. She wasn’t psychic, she didn’t have a preternatural instinct, and while her life was generally pretty good, she wouldn’t call herself <em> lucky</em>.</p><p>Instead, Anzu danced, and that meant that she knew the difference between the vibrations made by a young ballerina practicing her petit jetés on a hardwood floor and Jounouchi and Honda thundering down Domino High’s linoleum hallways in a race to get their food first from the school’s mini convenience store.</p><p>The tingle that started on the balls of her feet didn’t feel like any of that. But it did feel familiar.</p><p>It felt like heavy stone shifting.</p><p>Like the earth awoke from its slumber, ravenous and craving… <em>something</em>. The way the earth shook some months ago, back in Egypt, back when <em> Atem </em>—</p><p>Anzu shot an urgent, horrified glance at her lab partner, one stoic Seto Kaiba, who’d started coming to school every day since they’d returned from Egypt. It was almost like he didn’t want to miss Atem, so he settled for seeing Yuugi in class on a daily basis. At least, that was Anzu’s theory. It wasn’t as if he really <b>talked</b> to her, except in single word bursts. But he didn’t need words this time, and neither did she: he met her gaze with his own vexed one, his eyebrows knit– and then in the time it took Anzu to inhale, his eyes widened slightly.</p><p>Five seconds later, it was like that scene Anzu dimly remembered from <em> Jurassic Park</em>, except instead of water in a cup, the rippling liquid was in everyone’s ongoing chemistry assignments.</p><p>Seconds after that, bottles shuddered and tipped to the floor, glass shattering, plastic beakers and graduated cylinders bouncing to the floor. People’s murmurs started to grow urgent, fearful.</p><p>There was a <em> snap </em>!— and then Anzu felt an arm hook onto her torso as someone bodily swung her under the heavy lab bench, right as the overhead fluorescent light burst from its cover, sparking wires and brilliant glass showering the area where she’d stood moments before.</p><p>Then came the screams –from the other students in the class, and then surprisingly loud ones from the hallway, the classrooms next door, and outside on the track. Anzu swallowed, forcing herself to keep her head down but her eyes up –and on Seto Kaiba, whose own gaze never wavered from her own, as the world came crashing down around them.</p><hr/><p>It felt like an hour had passed, maybe two, but unless the clock on the wall had broken without falling, it had only been six minutes.</p><p><em> Only six minutes</em>.</p><p>But in that time, supply cabinets screeched off their wall mounts, vomiting glass, metal, and shards of plastic before they tipped over and splintered; a framed periodic table shuddered and fell flat on its face; ungraded tests gushed from plastic paper organizers; and outside, shingles and cement bricks from the perpetually under construction gymnasium struck the ground, near-silent claps of thunder amidst the chaos.</p><p>Anzu had expected that the fire alarm would go off, and that at least one other teacher would arrive momentarily to check on everyone. But her head throbbed and her throat felt parched from all the dust that had exploded from the ceiling when entire panels crumbled to the floor. </p><p>It was different… from back then, from when the rumbling meant that Atem had gone to the Afterlife, the Ceremonial Duel concluded and the Millennium Items were gone for good. Back then, the rumbling meant that they were no longer welcome here, that there was no place for living souls in the tomb of the once-nameless pharaoh. They’d all escaped from the crumbling dark and into the gleaming light of a new day in Egypt, savoring the warm open air.</p><p>Egypt had been nothing like <b>this</b>. Anzu heard Yuugi’s cough, Jounouchi mumbling something to him followed by a loud bang as he undoubtedly kicked some fallen object away from himself and his best friend. She heard Honda hiss as he touched some wound –a fresh scrape or cut, or the beginnings of an ugly bruise. Her own legs still felt like jelly, but tingled nonetheless, this time from falling asleep after having been tightly cramped for several minutes.</p><p>She tried to stand, tried to emerge from under the lab bench to check on everyone —she was the class representative, after all— but apparently Anzu had lost her sense of balance, and she wobbled and nearly slipped on a shard from the broken light fixture, falling backward into Seto Kaiba’s arms.</p><p>Anzu had never seen him so pale. Under the lab bench, in the shadows, he’d stared at her almost like he was trying to bore a hole in her head with his eyes. Now she knew he hadn’t been looking <em> at </em> her at all, but through her, trying to concentrate and solve this new problem that interfered with his meticulous routine. Judging by the momentary wobble in his own legs, she surmised he hadn’t quite figured it out yet. He did, however, abruptly remove his hands from her shoulders the moment Anzu found her footing; his gaze swept the classroom and took in the damage.</p><p>“Everyone okay in here?” Anzu swung her head toward the door, her neck making an awful set of popping sounds. Every joint felt cramped, tight, and burning. It was one of the teachers for first-years, someone Anzu hadn’t had before. As class representative, she should have been able to speak, to look around and mentally check off in her head which classmates were there today, and where they were now. But with each beat of her heart, her head throbbed, and most faces seemed to blur as she tried to make them out among the settling dust.</p><p>Someone else answered for her, a male voice; it wasn’t Kaiba or Yuugi or Jounouchi. Was it the teacher? In any case, the first-year instructor in the doorway said something else —wait here for some time and then head out to the open courtyard— and then he nodded and dashed down the hallway to look after other students.</p><p>At some point, Yuugi, Jounouchi, and Honda came up to her, but all she could do in reply to their questions was nod yes or shake her head no; yes, she was okay; no, she wasn’t bleeding; no, nothing was broken. Her ears still rung shrilly, and Anzu thought she saw blue and orange sparks at the edge of her vision, but if she blinked hard, they disappeared, at least for a minute. </p><p>Kaiba had stepped back, away from her and her shaking forearms, her wobbling legs. There, but removed, a meter or so away. His gaze seemed glassy as he looked around but didn’t appear to <b>see</b> anything. Still, he followed Anzu and the boys at that same “nearby but not together” distance, after they’d received the all-clear and students started to make their way down the stairs to the yard where they often had gym class. When they neared the entryway that separated the main building from the gym, though, Kaiba stepped into her field of view, but a second too late.</p><p>Anzu had heard the students wailing, crying out for Nagakura-sensei. She saw a thin leg clad in light blue striped sweats, a pool of blood rapidly staining the sides crimson. The rest of her was surrounded by debris.The woman had been the girls’ gym teacher for less than a year, and approached the job with the same unwavering enthusiasm that Anzu had for dance. In fact, she’d happily incorporated some of Anzu’s suggestions into the school’s required physical education dance lessons. After the most recent parent-teacher conference, Nagakura-sensei’s enthusiasm made Anzu’s parents grudgingly accept that dance could, in fact, be a viable career path for her.</p><p>And now Nagakura-sensei was gone. It didn’t matter how broad Seto Kaiba’s chest was; nothing could undo the sight of a teacher’s body crushed under a pile of cement brick. Apparently she’d died pushing her own students out of the way.</p><p>It wasn’t as if the school teetered on the verge of collapse, however. It was a <b> <em>mess</em></b>, no doubt about it, but… it seemed like everyone made it out okay. <em> Most </em> everyone, Anzu corrected herself. Even if they’d only lost Nagakura-sensei that day, it was still one loss too many.</p><p>A distant tsunami siren wailed disconsolately before petering off into silence. Female students hugged each other with desperation:</p><p>
  <em> I thought I was going to die!  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Poor Nagakura-sensei! Did you see—? </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Did you twist your ankle? </em>
</p><p>Several clumps of male students knelt or sat in the middle of the open field, trying not to look shaken even as they slapped each other's shoulders with little force. The conversations there seemed more staccato: </p><p>
  <em> Hey man, you holding up?  </em>
</p><p>
  <em> Nah, it’s just a scratch. Might get a badass scar from it though, right? </em>
</p><p>They were inland enough, here at school, that if there was an actual tsunami, they would see it coming and be able to escape to… well, somewhere, probably. But any visible water seemed relegated to a single broken sink near the gym, and a fire hydrant just outside the school gates, bubbling water from its base. </p><p>Anzu felt the ringing in her ears begin to subside just as a group of teachers —most covered in dust, and at least a few with what she assumed was blood— announced that the prefecture’s government had issued guidelines for schools to keep students in place, no one should leave until it was deemed safe….</p><p>She glanced around, trying to spot Kaiba, to thank him, to ask if <b>he</b> was okay, only to see him slipping out of the school’s front gate, wedged open as it was by the demolished brick pillar that used to support half of the gate. Anzu didn’t even have the chance to take a breath and call out to him before he was gone.</p><hr/><p>Later that night at home, Anzu sat with her parents in the living room watching the news. It was the only thing on, anyway, and it wasn’t as if she could just go to sleep, or do homework in her room.</p><p>While their modest home seemed mostly intact, a few things had broken during the earthquake: a glass ballerina figurine Anzu kept atop her dresser; a <em> Black Magician Girl on Broadway! </em> mug Yuugi had procured through some secret means; a few pieces of her mother’s china. Otherwise the house was just in need of a mild cleaning, what with books and papers scattered on every flat surface. Even their television survived, though there was a tiny hairline crack in one corner of the screen that her parents didn’t seem to notice.</p><p>This was far from the first earthquake the Mazaki household had lived through, but it was the first… <b>big</b> one in Anzu’s memory. Like, really big. There’d been others, something like one or two a year in Japan, but most of them seemed to happen on one end of the country or the other, never anywhere near Domino. The tsunami siren going off seemed a more frequent occurrence and more often than not, it was just a precaution: get high up, get away from the water. She’d never actually <b>seen</b> a tsunami here in Domino (not that she’d <b>never</b> seen a tsunami; her adventures with Yuugi –Atem, really– meant she’d seen several thanks to Dartz, but it wasn’t exactly something she cared to remember, especially these days). </p><p>Still, her parents were the no-nonsense sort, and had made sure to fix all the heavy furniture to the wall with anchors and straps and L-brackets and such. They had an emergency bag at the ready, right near the front door and tucked behind the umbrella stand. Anzu was the one responsible for checking the expiration date of the fire extinguishers throughout the house. Everything else was reliant on the fact that their home had been a new build just ten years ago, and was subject to some of the country’s most rigorous earthquake building standards.</p><p>
  <em>...live from the site of the largest fire in Domino at this moment, the Kaiba mansion, where the mostly-brick structure suffered a complete collapse earlier today due to today’s estimated 8.4 magnitude earthquake. Resulting water main breaks and the collapse of three nearby electrical poles have meant that… </em>
</p><p>“Hey, Mom, Dad? Can I borrow the car real quick?” Anzu had gotten her license two months after her 18th birthday a short while ago, but she hadn’t made much use of it besides going to get groceries for her mother one day when she was home sick.</p><p>Her parents turned to her, her father’s eyebrows raised. “You’ve had your license for what, three months now? And you’ve barely driven—” her father protested, but Anzu merely pointed to the screen. A few meters behind the reporter stood Seto and Mokuba Kaiba, staring blankly at the firefighters attempting to combat the blaze swallowing the Kaiba Mansion whole. The silhouette within the flames more resembled a skeleton’s hand than it did a home, the fingers of each floor, each ceiling, collapsing joint by joint, moment by moment.</p><p>“Those are my friends.” That was all Anzu said: no “<em>They have no parents</em>” or “<em>They might have a penthouse downtown, but….</em>” </p><p>At least some portion of Yuugi’s exploits became headline news, and fortunately or unfortunately, that meant Anzu’s parents knew she was part of them. That also meant they knew full well who Seto Kaiba was: not just the prefecture’s resident billionaire industrialist, but her best friend’s rival, her classmate, her… well, the guy who’d saved her life this afternoon, to be honest. That part had come out earlier, when they picked her up from school late in the day and asked her if she was okay, how she seemed so unscathed when they’d seen other students limping out of the school, or with bleeding bandages around their heads. Her arms were still sore from the hug they’d given her.</p><p>Mrs. Mazaki shot a glare at her husband, and his mouth snapped shut. She stood up and grabbed the car keys from the bowl on the half wall near the door, and gestured for Anzu to follow. “Honey, get the guest room ready, will you? And put out some of your old gym clothes, I <em> know </em> you never got rid of them and they’re in that box at the bottom of the closet in there.”</p><p>Mr. Mazaki’s ears turned red as he scrambled to his feet with a mumbled “Yes dear,” and he turned down the hallway to clean up the vacant spare bedroom that only ever saw use when Anzu’s paternal grandparents visited once a year.</p><p>Anzu turned to her mother, feeling tears prick at the corner of her eyes. Mrs. Mazaki favored her daughter with a half-smile. “Well, are you coming? Don’t think your generous spirit came from nowhere, young lady. I might not have been onboard with your dance career idea at first, but I’ve <em> always </em> told you to be there for your friends. If it weren’t for my friends, I never would have met your father, and then you wouldn’t be here today. So come on.” Anzu smiled gratefully before following her mother to the entryway, sliding her shoes on, and heading out into the night.</p><p>She tried not to think about her mother’s words “your dance career idea” echoing in her head. She tried not to remember the small, skinny envelope she had sitting on her desk in her bedroom, with the Juilliard School letterhead on it.</p><p>Anzu tried to spin everything she did into something that would help her in the future. Her grades would of course improve her chances of getting into a private university; her extracurriculars would boost her chances of a scholarship; her tangential notoriety could increase her visibility to admissions officers. Everything led back to getting into her dream performing arts school in New York.</p><p>But <b>this</b> was just the right thing to do. And she could focus on something to the exclusion of all else, if it meant she was helping. That was all she ever wanted to do, really. It would be nice if she could dance while doing it, somehow, but….</p><p>It didn’t matter. For now, there was just Seto and Mokuba Kaiba, and whether they’d admit to it or not, they needed her.</p><hr/><p>Mrs. Mazaki ended up parking the family’s Subaru some blocks away from the site of the former Kaiba Mansion; there were too many police cars, fire engines, and news vans lining the rest of the hilly street for them to find parking any closer. Unsurprisingly, that meant by the time they neared the summit, the area seemed to be completely opposite the private estate it was supposed to be.</p><p>“I’ll wait by the car. You go find your friends,” Mrs. Mazaki told Anzu. She still got out of the vehicle, if only to stare at the blaze up-close. The firelight reflected in her eyes made her seem sad, in contrast to the determined expression she’d worn throughout the drive as she navigated past blinking street lights and emergency crews directing traffic around this chunk of upended asphalt, that nearby fire. Anzu nodded in reply, then swallowed her own fears —were they okay? Had either of them somehow been <b>in</b> the home when it caught fire or started to flood? Were all of their limbs intact?— and pushing them back into her stomach before heading resolutely up the hill.</p><p>Though the blaze had died down somewhat thanks to the combined efforts of several firefighting teams, the area was still roped off; caution tape streamed from one police car to another in a sort of daisy chain around the area, while at least three different television reporters seemed to be recording or preparing to record yet another statement about the destruction of the Kaiba mansion. Anzu didn’t spot the Kaiba brothers at first. Too many people seemed to be running around, and she didn’t like the look of the one policeman whose eye she caught as she scanned the area, looking for the tallest beanpole or the smallest black mop. It helped to think of the brothers in such terms, if only because everything else was a blur of black and blue, of red and yellow.</p><p>Right near the edge of the light cast by the fire, just barely shadowed by the copse of trees lining the street, stood Seto and Mokuba Kaiba, a little dirty, but otherwise intact, as far as Anzu could tell. They were actually in the exact same spot she’d seen them standing during the television broadcast, even though that was at least 40 minutes ago. </p><p>A man in a gray coat who hadn’t been there during the TV report nodded after scribbling in a notebook and saying something to the elder Kaiba. He gave a slight bow with his head, and then turned and left the Kaiba brothers alone once more. Anzu exhaled a breath she didn’t know she’d been holding; neither of them had any bandages on, and there was no nearby ambulance with a beleaguered paramedic insisting one of the brothers get in so he could get examined. She’d imagined something like that on the way here, that she’d arrive and find herself looking into the back of an ambulance with a bloody Kaiba on a stretcher and a helpless Mokuba sobbing beside him.</p><p><em> If it had been like that...there’d be nothing I could do. </em> </p><p>So Anzu was grateful, for once, that her catastrophic thinking had been proven wrong. It was a bad habit she’d picked up since Battle City, back when bad situations got worse and her own fate seemed as much in the air as Yuugi’s. Whether this time, it was due to fate —or simply the sheer willpower of the Kaiba brothers— remained to be seen.</p><p>It hadn’t been easy getting here from Anzu’s neighborhood; several streets had liquefied and were closed off, while most others were clogged with heavy traffic consisting largely of emergency vehicles. Anzu waited until the policeman that stood between the caution tape strips, doing absolutely nothing besides looking serious and unhelpful, glanced toward the fire. She dodged under the tape and sprinted toward Seto and Mokuba, heedless of whether the cop spotted her and yelled anything or not.</p><p>“Hey,” Anzu said, slowing her gait to a walk as she reached the brothers. Neither one of them seemed to notice or register her appearance, not until she walked in front of them and blocked their view of the fire, the same way Kaiba had blocked her view of Nagakura-sensei earlier. She didn’t stretch her arms out, the way she had tried to block Kaiba back in the Virtual World —<em> that feels so long ago, now </em> — since they weren’t exactly trying to approach the blaze. It didn’t look like they even <b>wanted</b> to move, rooted to their positions the way they were. But if there was one thing Anzu was good at, it was making herself seen, one way or another.</p><p>“There’s no point in standing here in the cold staring at that—” Anzu cut herself off before saying “rubble.” True, there was little left of the Kaiba mansion beyond what was now a skeletal wrist, if that, jutting out from the hillside. The rest was char, smoke, mud, and little else. But regardless, it had been Kaiba’s home for years. And now… it was gone.</p><p>“Hey, why don’t we get out of here,” Anzu said, jutting her head in the direction of her mother’s car. “Come with me. It’ll be better than trying to stay at some hotel that’s nowhere near school or work, right?” The smile in her voice didn’t reach her face; she knew just as well as they did that schools prefecture-wide (if not nationwide) would be closed for some time, and even if Kaiba loved to throw himself into his work, there wasn’t much he could do without his expensive equipment, his handpicked staff, his… everything.</p><p>“Big Brother, I’m tired. And hungry,” Mokuba mumbled, tugging on Kaiba’s hand and as he pulled his brother down the hill in a stilted gait. They bypassed the police tape with a swift brushing of Kaiba’s arm, and he held it up as Anzu passed underneath it, her eyes meeting his for a split second. His eyes weren’t glassy, the way they’d been earlier, right after the quake. Instead he just looked…</p><p>
  <em> Tired. </em>
</p><p>It was a look Anzu knew well, at least on her own face. She had to admit, she hadn’t seen it on Kaiba’s face often, if at all. He seemed to be always on, always ready. But how could he have been ready for <b>this</b>?</p><p>It wasn’t as if Anzu wanted to ask, but she did open her mouth to thank Kaiba, in that automatic way she did whenever someone held a door open for her or something. But before she could speak, Mokuba’s stomach growled– loudly. Kaiba glanced down at his brother, about to say something, but then Mrs. Mazaki’s warm voice rang out from a few meters away.</p><p>“Hop in, boys. I’ve got fried chicken at home with your names on it!” She waved to them from a spot a few meters away from the family car, her genuine “Mom smile,” as Anzu termed it, creased with worry. Mrs. Mazaki had no regrets about calling their destination “home,” even as the Kaiba mansion collapsed just a bit more. </p><p>Had the brothers ever really thought of that place as home? Maybe it was just “where they lived,” as jet-set they seemed to be. Or maybe it, like their name, was just something they couldn’t let go of just yet.</p><p>She knew the feeling.</p><p>The fried chicken was no foie gras or whatever fancy food Anzu was sure Kaiba was used to having for dinner, but it was the best they’d been able to get on short notice, what with random neighborhoods being out of power and others warned not to try and use any gas stoves or furnaces due to potential ruptures of the underground mains. Had Anzu’s mother’s words been something he heard just yesterday, Anzu had no doubt Kaiba would have responded sardonically. But tonight he just nodded wordlessly and got into the backseat of the car.</p><p>Anzu got into the passenger seat a moment later, and remembered to scoot the seat up as far as she could tolerate; weren’t Kaiba’s legs two thirds of his total height or something? Her seatbelt chafed at the neck a bit, but considering the scene they were driving away from, she didn’t want to bother adjusting. She took one last glance at the orange-red glow in the car’s rear view mirror, and saw Seto Kaiba in the back seat, his eyes closed for what was probably the first time that day. She could tolerate a little chafing. And probably more than her fair share of sardonic comments in the days ahead, if she was being realistic. But...that was okay. If it meant the Kaiba brothers —even if only Mokuba would outright call her a friend— were safe, then she’d put up with whatever Seto Kaiba could throw at her.</p><hr/><p>The ride home was quiet and uneventful, and took less time than it had getting there, thanks to the rapid response from prefectural emergency crews. While nothing could shove the cracked sidewalks or the upended chunks of street back into place, all of the fires Anzu and her mother had passed on the way to the Kaiba mansion were extinguished, and now there were flashing detour signs, neon-vested crews directing traffic, and fewer people on the street, hugging each other or ogling the destruction all around.</p><p>Judging by the news, most of Domino had it lucky. There were some cities that had gotten flooded by the tsunami that had roared almost 10 kilometers inland, and others that were being evacuated because the quake damaged nearby nuclear reactors. Sure, there were some parts of the prefecture that were worse off than others… Anzu glanced at the gray smoke filling the night sky in the rear view mirror.</p><p><em> Way worse off</em>.</p><p>Anzu had been meaning to start a daily gratitude list. After today, she could probably name a hundred things she was grateful for having.</p><p><em> Still having</em>, Anzu amended as Mrs. Mazaki pulled the Subaru into the small carport next to the house. It was a good thing the heavy rippled metal sheet that had once served as a “roof” for the carport fell down some months ago and Mr. Mazaki had never gotten around to bolting back up again. If he had, it might have fallen on the car and shattered the windshield, and then what would they have done? </p><p>
  <em> I still would have wanted to go. They probably just wouldn’t have been all that fond of walking seven and a half kilometers to get to my house. </em>
</p><p>Especially after their own mansion had burned to cinders.</p><p>The Kaiba brothers followed Mrs. Mazaki up a shallow set of steps into the house, Anzu bringing up the rear. She felt awkward, not carrying anything like she usually did when she accompanied her mother somewhere in the car. But what was there to bring? If the fire had started not long after the earthquake, then even if Kaiba had headed straight there after he escaped school, there wouldn’t have been anything he could have done, anything he could have saved without endangering his own life. Whatever he had… would be gone.</p><p>“Hey there, come on in,” Anzu heard her father say. He sounded strained, like he was trying to sound “normal” in spite of the fact that his teenage daughter was essentially bringing two boys home to stay for who-knows-how-long. “You boys like chicken? We’ve got enough for at least two and a half teenagers!” </p><p>Anzu groaned, even as her father tried to laugh at his joke. “Dad, <b>really</b>?” Her father took one look at Mokuba’s withdrawn expression and his chuckles dwindled. Mr. Mazaki pursed his lips and pulled out a chair for the younger Kaiba to sit in. He handed the entire bucket of chicken to Kaiba and plunked a roll of paper towels in front of Mokuba.</p><p>“Eat up,” Mrs. Mazaki said, a weary smile creasing her face. “When you’re ready, we’ve got some new toothbrushes you can use and a pair of sweats you can wear for bed.” She looked like she was going to say something else, maybe “You can stay as long as you like,” but the words never came. </p><p>Kaiba bobbed his head in what Anzu assumed was thanks, the first time she’d ever seen him make such a gesture to anyone, but he didn’t say anything. After a beat, Mrs. Mazaki leaned into her husband, whispering something in his ear. Mr. Mazaki cleared his throat and rose from his seat.</p><p>“Get some rest, everyone,” he said. It wasn’t his usual “Good night, Anzu,” because how could anyone have a <b>good night</b> after a day like today? She’d be lucky if she could get to sleep at all, not knowing what tomorrow would bring. But… at least there was chicken.</p><p>Mokuba listlessly chewed at a drumstick, then a thigh, then another drumstick. Kaiba just sat there, completely still, but his eyes flicked from left to right, examining Anzu’s home. She wasn’t sure if she should say anything. Or what she <b>could</b> say. So she grabbed a piece of chicken for herself and sighed before plopping herself next to Kaiba and eating with her hands. There were a few bags of scattered fries and a box with biscuits, none of it particularly good for her diet <b>or</b> her complexion, but what did any of it matter anymore?</p><p>Domino was in shambles, Mokuba and Seto Kaiba were staying at her house for the foreseeable future, and oh yes, <b>that letter</b>.</p><p>Anzu really didn’t want to go to bed. She didn’t want to <b>try</b> and sleep, because even if she somehow managed it, she was sure all she’d have were nightmares. Bricks falling, dust clogging her lungs, Nagakura-sensei giving her a thumbs-up as she walked into the light. Then razor-sharp letters falling from the sky, slicing through Anzu’s skin until she was nothing but a pile of ribbons.</p><p>But what was there to say?</p><p>Soon there were only crumpled paper bags, empty cups, and greasy paper towels on the table. Anzu wordlessly stood up and bunched them into her palm, then tossed them into the kitchen trash bin next to the counter. If this had been any other night, she would have crowed something about a three-pointer, or a hole in one, just to make her sports fanatic father laugh. But tonight, she just let the lid spin back into position.</p><p>She couldn’t just leave them down here, right? They didn’t even know where the guest room was. Why did it feel like she needed a shot of courage right now?</p><p>
  <em> Well, it’s not as if I’ve ever had boys stay over before. Not even Yuugi…. </em>
</p><p>Especially not Yuugi, actually. Her parents weren’t exactly fond of him these days, having gotten Anzu involved in things like Duelist Kingdom and unplanned trips to America, Egypt, and, in her parents’ words “who knows where else.”</p><p>
  <em> “But Yuugi’s grandpa was in danger!” </em>
</p><p>
  <em> “How was that your responsibility? And the news said that there were terrorist attacks happening during that so-called ‘Battle City’ tournament you went to! Someone destroyed an entire pier at the Domino Docks!”  </em>
</p><p>Oh, that. It wasn’t as if she could explain that she was <b>there</b> when the dock got destroyed, and it wasn’t by terrorists, it was technically by the tournament’s own organizer when he had a remote controlled helicopter slam into a cargo container to save her life, but….</p><p>
  <em> “And when all those crazy monster sightings were happening, what did you do? Hop on some stranger’s plane and fly to America!” </em>
</p><p>Ah yes, America. Where Pegasus had flown everyone thanks to a mysterious foreknowledge of his impending disappearance. Where Anzu clambered on top of a speeding train in an effort to save Yuugi —no, <b>Atem</b>— from making one of the worst mistakes of his life. Second life. Reincarnation? Whatever.</p><p>And it was where Kaiba “strongly encouraged” Yuugi and Jounouchi to duel in the KC Grand Prix so that they could get a free ride back to Japan.</p><p>That America, which now brought forth memories of duel after duel after duel, rather than Anzu’s dream of studying at one of the world’s top dance schools.</p><p>
  <em> A dream deferred, I guess. </em>
</p><p>Her parents either didn’t remember that Kaiba had been involved in every single one of those incidences too, or they didn’t care. He was a special exception, maybe, for having saved her life today. Again.</p><p>“Come on, I’ll show you guys upstairs.” </p><p>
  <em> There, not that hard, was it? </em>
</p><p>The boys rose and shoved their chairs under the small round table with a squeak and fell in line behind Anzu as she flicked off the kitchen light and headed upstairs.</p><p>She gestured to the guest bedroom, which indeed, her father had cleaned up. A pair of old boys’ gym sweats lay on the bed, somehow still intact after more than 20 years. The smaller of the pair had her father’s name on it: Ietsugu Mazaki Class 1-C, next to a blue toothbrush in plastic wrapping. </p><p>“Bathroom’s the last room at the end of the hall,” Anzu said softly. “I’m right next door, if… if you need anything else, I guess.”</p><p>She turned to go, but Kaiba’s voice stopped her in her tracks. “What’s this?”</p><p>He was holding up the other gym uniform, which didn’t have a name on it, just a smeared hand drawing of the Abominable Snowman.</p><p>Anzu’s lip curled up in the corners. Her father had a bad habit of hanging onto things laced with memory, but she didn’t honestly expect <b>this</b> would be one of them. “Ah. Dad’s college wrestling nickname was ‘Yeti.’ I guess he hung onto it after all these years. Don’t worry, I’m sure it’s clean. Did you get a toothbrush?” </p><p>Kaiba glanced back at the bed, where a bright green toothbrush lay nestled among the selection of blankets piled on top of the queen-sized bed. “Yeah. We’ll be fine.” </p><p>Anzu inhaled sharply. This was home. This was safe. No dust, no falling brick. Kaiba could be less than a meter away, looking and acting like a shell of the person who she’d just been working alongside in Chemistry Lab earlier today, and the outside might look like hell, but… it was enough. It had to be, for now.</p><p>“Okay then. Well… good night.”</p><p>She winced as soon as she said it, but Kaiba didn’t seem to interpret her words as anything more than customary. She bowed her head in his direction and then shuffled out of the room, pulling the door shut as she went. On the other side, in the darkened hallway, she let out a long sigh.</p><p>“Good job, Mazaki. Real good job.”</p><hr/><p>
  <em> No ignoring it anymore, then. </em>
</p><p>It wasn’t as if she was hungry anymore or anything. Anzu figured she should wait until Kaiba and Mokuba used the hall bathroom —it wasn’t as if she was half as dirty as they were, covered in soot and who-knows-what else. </p><p>
  <em> I hope Dad left out towels, too. </em>
</p><p>They could shower, brush their teeth, and go to sleep. But Anzu? </p><p>She stared at the letter on her desk, the one she’d plucked from the ground as soon as she’d gotten home. The quake shook the mailbox to the ground and dented it, almost beyond recognition, but Anzu saw the corner of the white envelope peering out from under the lid. She’d nearly sliced her fingers open prying it out from the flap of metal it had gotten stuck under, and at the time, she had thought it’d be worth it.</p><p>But it was so thin. So small.</p><p><em> It can’t be anything other than a rejection letter</em>.</p><p>So… if she knew what it had to be, then there was no point in opening it at all, right? She could just ignore it.</p><p>At least for tonight.</p><p>And yet Anzu couldn’t exactly go to sleep right away. She waited for some sign of the brothers emerging to at least brush their teeth, but so far, there was nothing. </p><p>Anzu pulled a moist wipe from her nightstand, scrubbing the last of the day’s dust and grime from her face. Somehow, it didn’t quite feel enough. It was like her face had gained a permanent shadow that no amount of moisturizing ingredients could brighten. </p><p>
  <em> Maybe I just need some sleep? </em>
</p><p>Except she wasn’t tired. And she had no desire to turn her lights off, to close her eyes, not when she had no idea if the electricity would go out tomorrow, if the water would shut off, if there would be <b>more</b> aftershocks. There had already been three, less than an hour after the initial quake, but after everyone at Domino High had gathered in the yard. Everyone had started hugging then, if just to feel some semblance of balance. But Anzu’s own legs felt tingly and wobbled the rest of the day.</p><p>Reports indicated there would probably be more aftershocks, but who knew when they’d strike or how powerful they would be? Would putting things back together even be worth it, if it would all just fall apart again?</p><p>
  <em> Well, it’s not like I have any control over any of that. </em>
</p><p>So what could Anzu do right now, in this moment? Her room was as cleaned up as it could get. The envelope… well, it could stay where it was. And she could change into her night clothes, at least. She’d changed into more comfortable clothes as soon as she got home, counting herself lucky to even be able to shower, let alone with hot water. But it was cold now, and while normally that helped with getting to sleep, tonight all it did was keep her eyes wide open.</p><p>Maybe if she did a bit of light exercise, she could exhaust herself to sleep. Besides, when she thought about how <b>slow </b>she’d been today, it was almost embarrassing. Seto Kaiba, having to grab her and pull her under their lab bench? She prided herself on her sense of rhythm, on being in tune with the world around her. And yet today she’d felt completely out of sync, except for that first moment before the quake hit….</p><p>
  <em> If only I’d been stronger! </em>
</p><p>Anzu frowned, switching from stretches to push ups. With each push, she glared up at the offending white envelope on her desk. What had it been? Her essays? The fact that she was an international student? Her pre-screening video?</p><p>It wasn’t as if they’d <b>tell</b> her. No doubt the letter was full of generic platitudes, something along the lines of “Regrettably, we must inform you that you have not been recommended for enrollment. However, the faculty was particularly impressed by your pre-screening video and encourages you to apply again in the future…”</p><p>Maybe it was her figure. She wasn’t exactly one of those lithe ballerina-types. If generosity was hereditary, then so was body shape, since Anzu and her mother both were curvy for their height. She’d started thinking of it as a blessing, once she got to high school and instead of feeling awkward around boys, started thinking she wanted their attention. Specifically <b>Atem’s</b> attention, but she hadn’t known his name at the time. Or his true destiny.</p><p>And that whole “Pharaoh in the body of my best friend” made things even more awkward.</p><p>
  <em> Good thing I never explained that to my parents. They probably would have locked me in my room for the rest of my life. </em>
</p><p>Anzu started to do sit-ups, hooking her feet under the low frame of her bed.</p><p>
  <em> Maybe if I get to a hundred tonight, I can get some sleep. </em>
</p><p>That was her theory, anyway, until Anzu’s door, left ajar so she could hear when the Kaiba brothers finished brushing their teeth or whatever, creaked open.</p><p>“What are you doing?”</p><p>Anzu had been mid pull-up when Kaiba’s voice startled her, and she fell flat on her back.</p><p>“Ow! Kaiba-kun?”</p><p>Kaiba leaned against her door frame, which would have been bizarre had he not been wearing her father’s old gym clothes. Instead he looked… ordinary. Even his hair didn’t seem quite so put-together as it usually did.</p><p>“Oh, I was just… exercising, I guess. Sorry if I woke you or something.”</p><p>“I hadn’t gotten to sleep yet,” Kaiba said, crossing his arms over his chest. He raised a brow at her, as if to ask <em>“You too?”</em></p><p>“Maybe… maybe we should go back downstairs then? So we don’t wake everyone up,” Anzu suggested. Kaiba inclined his head and pushed himself away from the door, heading back down the hall without a word.</p><p>“Guess I’ll make some tea or something, then…” Anzu murmured, following him out the door.</p><p>There was no point in talking about the earthquake, Anzu decided. No point in checking whether or not he’d been thinking the same thing that she had, in that split second before everything fell to pieces. </p><p>She went through the motions of preparing some chamomile tea, deciding that Kaiba was probably lactose intolerant and didn’t want warm milk, and he probably wasn’t the kind of guy who wanted honey in his tea, either.</p><p>Was he one of those sorts who saw honey in tea as sacrilege? He probably had his coffee black, too.</p><p><em> But I can’t just ask him! It’s– it’s </em> weird<em>. </em></p><p>Weird that he was there, weird that they were together, weird that they were <b>alone</b>. But for some reason, “weird” just didn’t do the situation they were both in justice. She’d invited him to her house (sort of), she’d kept him up (sort of), and here she was, trying to help him (sort of). Nothing seemed quite… <b>right</b>.</p><p>“So, college wrestling, huh? What’s your father do now?”</p><p>Anzu blinked in surprise and glanced back at Kaiba to reply, but the moment she did, her fingers slipped from the handle of the tea kettle to the burning hot spout.</p><p>“Ouch!” She swallowed the tail end of the yelp as soon as it sounded, and immediately thrust her fingers under a stream of cold water from the nearby sink. She relaxed after a moment, but when she turned around again, she was surprised to find Kaiba right behind her —immediately behind her, in fact— with a strange expression on his face.</p><p>“Uh… I’m fine. Fingers just slipped, is all.”</p><p>“You should be more careful.” </p><p>Anzu blinked. Her gut told her to snap at him, to say she normally <b>was</b> careful, but their whole world had gotten upended, quite literally, today, and she could handle a little burn on her fingertips. She’d handled everything else, hadn’t she? But… something about the way he said it was different from that familiar sardonic tone he used when mocking Jounouchi.</p><p>“I– I will. Thanks.”</p><p>Again, he didn’t reply, just tilted his head a bit. He also didn’t move back.</p><p>Anzu gulped and went back to preparing the tea, focusing intently on her fingers so she didn’t burn them again and give Kaiba an excuse to…</p><p>
  <em> To do what? Come closer? To hold my hand? </em>
</p><p>“He’s an electrical engineer,” Anzu said, and after preparing the tea, she handed a cup to Kaiba, “for one of your rival companies, sorry.” </p><p>Kaiba took the cup without question. “I have a lot of rivals.” He took a sip, surprising Anzu with how <b>calm</b> he looked when his eyes closed and he inhaled the gentle herbal aroma.</p><p>“And your mother?”</p><p>He had yet to sit down, to move away from her at the counter. Anzu turned back to preparing her own cup, perhaps being a bit liberal with the honey for her tea.</p><p><em> Why does he care? Since </em> when <em> does he care? </em></p><p>That’s when Anzu remembered: today he’d saved her life <b>again</b>. The first time was… probably back the pier, after... after Malik. After that, in the underwater fortress. And then there’d been Dartz. And… </p><p>Maybe he’d cared, in his own strange way, for a long time now.</p><p>“An accountant,” Anzu sighed. She took a sip of tea. “I just… I could never do something like that.” </p><p>“Not your speed?” </p><p>“There’s just no… no energy in it, you know? I need to do something more… creative. More physical.”</p><p>Again with the raised eyebrow. But there was a little quirk to Kaiba’s lips that wasn’t there usually —at least, not that Anzu remembered seeing (not that she spent a whole lot of time looking at Seto Kaiba's lips, <em>really</em>!)— and she flushed.</p><p>“Dance, I mean. <b>Dance</b>.” The exhaustion of the day finally crept its way into her bones, and Anzu flopped gracelessly in the nearest chair, sighing yet again. “They don’t approve, obviously. I mean, they’re a bit more amenable to it since Nagakura-sensei talked to them, but—”</p><p>Remembering the cheerful gym teacher —and her blood-soaked sweats— just made tears sting Anzu’s lash line. But if there was one thing she wouldn’t do, it was cry in front of Seto Kaiba. Not here, not anywhere. Not <b>anymore</b>.</p><p>“Well. They probably have a point. It’s not exactly a career with long term prospects, I guess.”</p><p>Much as she tried to ignore it, the presence of the unopened letter from Juilliard sitting on her desk itched at her brain, like an annoying commercial jingle she couldn’t get out of her head. It would have been easier if the earthquake had just destroyed their mailbox completely, and any contents got swept away in the wind or a fire hydrant bursting or something. It would have been better to not get <b>anything</b> from the school instead of… of… </p><p>“Dammit,” Anzu swore softly. She tried to will the tears away, but they came regardless, pooling under her eyes and streaking down her cheeks. “I didn’t— I tried... “ She scrubbed at her cheeks, desperate to avoid looking pathetic in front of Seto Kaiba, here in her own damn kitchen. This was her territory, her home; shouldn’t she feel completely comfortable here, completely capable?</p><p>That stupid letter was ruining everything. </p><p>Without looking at Kaiba’s expression —surely he was holding back a laugh at how pathetic she was behaving, right?— Anzu bolted from her chair and dashed back up to her room. She grabbed the offending letter off her desk and ran back to the kitchen, taking the stairs two at a time with steps as light as she could manage. Sure, she was furious at herself, but she didn’t want to wake anyone up.</p><p>“Here,” she managed, huffing a little. “Just– I can’t open it. You do it.”</p><p>Both of Kaiba’s eyebrows raised in unison this time; either he hadn’t expected her to come back downstairs, or he hadn’t expected her to thrust a letter from The Juilliard School in his face. He took the letter from Anzu’s outstretched hand, noting the slight shaking, the gulp she forced down her throat.</p><p>Without any further pretense, he tore open the envelope and unfolded the single-page letter within. He read silently, deep blue eyes scanning each English word without so much as a quiver in his lips to indicate what he was reading. Then he looked up at her, his expression unreadable.</p><p>“What? What does it say?”</p><p>“You know what it says, Mazaki,” Kaiba told her with a sigh. “What’s the point in me reading it to you? You don’t strike me as a masochist.”</p><p>This time Anzu did collapse to the floor, her knees simply failing to hold her up another moment longer. She stopped crying, but now her chest hurt, like her heart was actually breaking inside her chest.</p><p>“Yeah, I...I did know. And I haven’t told them yet. My parents, I mean.”</p><p>Kaiba stayed silent a minute, glancing down at Anzu and then at the letter. Then to her absolute surprise, he slipped the letter back into its envelope and proceeded to rip it all in half, then in quarters, and finally into tiny pieces. He sprinkled the whole thing into the trash can, pieces mixing with the greasy paper towels and the empty fried chicken bucket.</p><p>“I’m sorry.”</p><p>Anzu looked up, confusion and astonishment warring on her face. Why on Earth was Seto Kaiba <b>apologizing</b> to her?</p><p>“That you didn’t get in. The letter didn’t say why.” </p><p>Anzu let out a soft, wry laugh. “I doubt they would. It could have been anything: my pre-screening video didn’t have enough ‘technique,’ or maybe my choreography was poor. I don’t know, maybe my English just isn’t good enough.” </p><p>“Ninomiya-sensei would beg to differ,” Kaiba said. This time Anzu’s surprise quickly softened into something else. </p><p>“Thank you, Kaiba-kun.” She rose to her feet with a sharp inhale, glancing up at her family’s modest home with its boring ceilings, its already-outdated wallpaper, its yellowing linoleum. It felt <b>small</b>, even though it wasn’t nearly as tiny as the apartment Jounouchi lived in with his dad. Yuugi’s home above the Turtle Game Shop was about the same size, and so was the place where Honda lived with his parents and his dog.</p><p>“It doesn’t matter, in the end. I practiced, I saved, I must have recorded that pre-screening video at least ten times… and I’ll never get that application fee back. It was all a waste. And my parents will probably say as much. They’d rather I get a ‘sensible degree’ in something like computer science or education.” </p><p>At this, Kaiba scoffed. “You don’t strike me as a member of the IT crowd,” he began, “but a teacher, maybe…” He nodded, as if this thought were intriguing.</p><p>
  <em> Who am I kidding? He probably reads spreadsheets on a daily basis that are more interesting than my future. </em>
</p><p>Anzu glanced at Kaiba skeptically. “You think I’d be a good teacher?”</p><p>“You could be a good <b>anything</b>, if you stopped limiting yourself to one school in one place, Mazaki,” Kaiba said without missing a beat. Anzu blushed. She wasn’t used to getting compliments like this, not in her home, not… not from someone like Seto Kaiba.</p><p>“I… I just thought that if I could pick just one place to go for university, it should be my moonshot, right? The one place that I’d —well, not saw off my leg for, I kind of need my legs to dance— but the place that I’d give up…” Anzu licked her lips, remembering the shock on Yuugi and Jounouchi’s faces when she’d told them she was working at Burger World to save up for her dream of studying dance in New York. “That I’d give up my family for.” </p><p>
  <em> My family… and my friends. </em>
</p><p>If by some chance, they hadn’t gone to Egypt last year, if there’d been no trip to a “World of Memory,” no Ceremonial Duel in an ancient pharaoh’s tomb… would she have given <b>him</b> up, too?</p><p>Was it really “giving up” when all Anzu wanted to do was escape her family? Wasn’t that a normal thing, to want to “leave the nest,” so to speak, and pursue her dream? Was it asking for so much, to be supported by the people she loved the most?</p><p>It didn’t matter. <b>None</b> of it mattered, right? Maybe she just wanted someone to tell her that she was wrong about nothing mattering, and that was why she didn’t feel totally sure that her efforts went to waste. There was still a question hanging in the air, a need for validation. Someone, somewhere to tell her... </p><p>“It matters that you tried. You’ve learned something, haven’t you?”</p><p>Anzu blinked. <em> I-Is this a pep talk? Is this Kaiba’s way of cheering me up? His whole mansion burns to the ground, but he’s trying to cheer me up about not getting into Juilliard? </em></p><p>It didn’t seem possible, but Anzu couldn’t think of a better explanation for why, after finishing his cup of chamomile tea, Seto Kaiba continued to sit in her kitchen, while wearing her father’s old college gym clothes, and talk to her.</p><p>“Yeah, I guess…” Anzu looked up at Kaiba, who seemed to be waiting for her to explain what she’d learned from the experience. Was this what he did with Mokuba every day after school? Was Kaiba less a brother and more a father—</p><p>
  <em>Oh.</em>
</p><p>Like two puzzle pieces clicking together —Anzu winced at the thought— her own words reverberated in her mind: <em> That I’d give up my family for… give up my family for… give up my family… </em></p><p>Seto Kaiba didn’t <b>have</b> parents to tell him it was a bad idea to pursue this degree or that project. He didn’t have anyone other than his own business managers to tell him what was and wasn’t a waste of money, and frankly, anyone he hired probably wouldn’t dare to tell their boss that he tended to go overboard with all things dueling. Even his own Board of Directors had betrayed him. With the Kaiba mansion in ruins, that meant the last remnant of Gozaburo Kaiba —outside his name— was gone too, right? </p><p>After Battle City ended last year, Anzu read up on Gozaburo Kaiba, if just to reconcile the sociopath that had tried to kill everyone in an underwater fortress with the legendary business tycoon whose name had been plastered all over Domino’s industrial buildings: Kaiba Heavy Industries, Kaiba Ironworks, Kaiba Corporation Advanced Armaments…. But before Seto Kaiba had ever met Anzu, Yuugi, and their friends, he’d taken over his adopted father’s company, closing all those factories and remaking a once-powerful defense contractor into an entertainment technology company.</p><p>
  <em> Is he… relieved that it’s gone? Happy, even? </em>
</p><p>“Out with it, Mazaki. You’re not the type to play around, so just say what you’re thinking already.”</p><p>Why was it that Seto Kaiba could make her flush so, simply by acting like his usual abrasive self? Though… it wasn’t as if he was being tactless. He was just calling her out on her random bouts of silence, her pursed lips and averted gazes. Seto Kaiba didn’t dally in pretense: he worked directly, with determination, sparing nothing along the way.</p><p>“Wh-What do you mean, ‘play around’?” Anzu asked indignantly. “I wasn’t going to say—”</p><p>“That you’re sorry for saying you’d ‘give up your family’ just to get into your dream school, when you wouldn’t be giving up a damn thing? That you know it’s foolish to complain about one application to one university when other people don’t even have a roof over their heads tonight?”</p><p>Uh-oh, the tears were coming back. But this time Anzu couldn’t be sure if they stemmed from the heartbreak of rejection or Kaiba’s words just now. The tears stung hotly at her lash line, little drops of burning that somehow felt even hotter than the tea kettle had.</p><p>“Do you really think I’d say those sorts of things, Kaiba-kun?” she asked softly. Had she given him that impression? After all this time? Besides, he was wrong. He <b>did</b> have a roof over his head tonight. Because of her! But the other part... </p><p>He didn’t seem to care for her soft-spoken words, as he sighed (a little dramatically, in Anzu’s opinion) and pulled his forearms off the kitchen table from where he’d been leaning on them. He looked off to the side, at the dim kitchen with its crooked spice rack and clunky appliances. </p><p>“You’ve never had any problem being completely honest with me before, Mazaki. So why start watching your words around me now?” </p><p>This time he looked Anzu directly in the eyes, and his gaze didn’t waver. It was like being back under the lab bench, his hands resting on her forearms above both their heads, shielding them from the glass and dust raining down from above while the earth convulsed below.</p><p>“I–I don’t know what you mean,” Anzu whispered, feeling like his words were eating away at hers. Why was he doing this? Backing her into this corner, where it felt like the only thing she could do was be rude, be <b>mean</b>? It wasn’t who she wanted to be, not even now, with absolutely everything in her life a complete and total mess.</p><p>Seto Kaiba had the audacity to roll his eyes at her. “At Pegasus’ castle,” he began, ticking off items on his fingers, “in the virtual world at the base of that goddamned staircase. Back on the Battle Ship. And I’m pretty sure you made at least one snarky remark to me in Egypt, if I remember correctly.” </p><p>“<em>Snarky</em>?” Anzu repeated dully. “<em>SNARKY?</em>” She kept her voice low, suddenly aware that with each passing moment, Kaiba’s ribbing got her hotter, louder, and definitely less tired than she was even five minutes ago. So much for the chamomile tea helping her with getting to sleep tonight. </p><p>Why couldn't Seto Kaiba be boring?</p><p>“Point being you’ve never had a problem telling me what you think to my face, so even if I got the exact words wrong, I’d rather you say them anyway.” Unspoken were his reasons <b>why</b> he wanted Anzu to tell him that yes, she’d learned something from her rejection to Juilliard the day Domino fell apart: she’d learned that it was minuscule, compared to his losses, tonight and so many nights before this.</p><p>That if he could recover from losing Atem, so could she.</p><p>If he could handle his own adopted father trying to kill him, she could handle her parents not being completely on board with her dream of studying dance in America.</p><p>If he could handle losing both of his parents, only to have any remaining biological family squander whatever inheritance they may have had and leave him and his young brother in an orphanage...</p><p>“This is different,” Anzu whispered finally. She’d never had a conversation like this before. Not with him, not with anybody. Not at midnight, not in her own home, not after a giant earthquake shifted almost everything she knew.</p><p>
  <em> It’s not a contest. No one gets points for having lost the most, or hurt the most. </em>
</p><p>“It shouldn’t be. Nothing’s changed,” Kaiba said flatly, and at that, Anzu slammed her palms down on the table and stood, leaning down on the table so she could glare at him. Who cared if he saw her tear-lined cheeks, her red-rimmed eyes? She didn’t need to impress Seto Kaiba, of all people.</p><p>“You’re wrong,” she hissed. She glared at him, looking the once-mighty Seto Kaiba up and down. This was a man she’d seen in expensive trench coats, designer suits, custom “battle suits” and tailored jackets. But here? Here in her kitchen, he was just another teenage boy with mussed hair and old sweats. “<b>Everything else</b> may have changed, Kaiba-kun, but I refuse to change who <b>I </b>am just so you can feel like the King of Losing—”</p><p>The second the words were out of her mouth, she regretted them. She had been trying to say why she didn’t want to be mean to him, and here she’d gone and…</p><p>Kaiba let out a breath. Anzu didn’t expect the sound, didn’t expect him to close his eyes and roll his head around, cracking his neck, before opening them again to stare at her tiredly.</p><p>“I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—” she fumbled, terrified to look at him straight-on. It was easier to play with her fingers, to look at the table and try and spot a moisture ring than it was to meet his gaze. She felt so hot right now, and her cuffed fleece pajamas didn’t help with the feeling that she was constricted, stuck, burning alive with shame.</p><p>“No, you <b>did</b> mean, Mazaki. That’s what I was talking about all along. You have no problem calling me out on my bullshit, and I have no problem calling you out on yours.”</p><p>Anzu collapsed back into her chair, now gaping openly at Kaiba. “Oh.”</p><p>“Yeah, ‘oh.’ So, you were going to ask something. I know that look on your face.”</p><p>Anzu was tempted to answer Kaiba’s question with one of her own: what look? How did he seem to know it so well? But she furrowed her brows, trying to think back to what she’d been thinking about when this whole argument started.</p><p>“Are you relieved? That the Kaiba —that Gozaburo Kaiba’s mansion— is gone now?”</p><p>Again, Seto Kaiba sighed as he leaned back in his creaky wooden chair. “It <b>is</b> more accurate to call it Gozaburo’s mansion, really. He’s the one that built it, out of imported brick, imported wood. There were Italian marble fireplaces and chandeliers with a thousand Swarovski crystals hanging off them. All to show off.”</p><p>“Not really your style, eh?” Anzu attempted the tiniest of smiles. She didn’t expect the tiny smile she got back. Her eyes widened, and the flush that colored her face first from anger and then from shame deepened for a different reason altogether.</p><p>“After taking over the company and Gozaburo —doing whatever he did, running away, committing suicide, I don’t know and I no longer care— it was just the easiest option. Mokuba and I had already been living there for six years, so what was another three or four?” He leaned back again, staring at the ceiling like he could see through it, out to a night sky full of stars and not smoke.</p><p>“And yet every day I spent there, I remembered him. The way his shoes sounded on the marble floors, getting closer, or the sound of his voice echoing down the hall after he locked me in my room again. Even before we went to that godforsaken fortress, it felt like he was haunting me.”</p><p>“Kaiba-kun…” Anzu murmured, not really knowing what else to say.</p><p>He leaned forward abruptly, his face just a breath away from hers as he regarded her, his brows drawn down slightly and his lips fixed in a straight line. “Don’t call me that.”</p><p>“W-What?” Had he suddenly developed an aversion to her use of honorifics? Did he think she was being patronizing? She was only trying to be polite, after everything— “What do you want me to call you, then?” It wasn’t as if she’d given him some sort of nickname, the way he had for Jounouchi. If you could call <em> bonkotsu </em> a nickname. It was more of an insult, really, and not the least bit endearing….</p><p>“Seto,” he replied simply, and Anzu’s eyes widened.</p><p>
  <em> He doesn’t mean— </em>
</p><p>It was one thing to call Yuugi by his given name without any honorifics. They’d known each other since junior high. Yuugi had seen her through her awkward, gangly limb phase, and she’d seen him… well, not “grow,” exactly, but definitely mature. But she still referred to Jounouchi and Honda by their family names; Jounouchi blushed whenever someone said “Katsuya” (Anzu suspected Mai had something to do with it), and Honda claimed that whenever someone called him “Hiroto,” he felt like he was in trouble. Otogi had prodded her to call him “Ryuuji” in the past, but Anzu had never been one of his fangirls, and stuck with “Otogi-kun,” and she still had a polite relationship at best with Ryou Bakura.</p><p>“Seto-kun,” she tried, but she still blushed as she said it. </p><p><em> Why, why, why do I keep acting so stupid in front of him? It’s </em> just <em> Seto Kaiba! </em> </p><p>Or now, as he apparently preferred she call him, “Seto-kun.” </p><p>
  <em> Ugh! </em>
</p><p>Seto favored her with another one of those small smiles of his, and for the first time, Anzu saw it just barely reach his tired eyes.</p><p>“We should get to bed,” Anzu said, deciding that she might need to practice saying “Seto-kun” on her own before using it in front of anybody, least of all her parents. Maybe even Mokuba. The kid did have a habit of reading too much into certain situations…. But avoiding saying his name altogether was easy, when it was only the two of them and—</p><p><em> Oh, fudge</em>. Anzu swore mentally as she played back what she had just said. To Seto Kaiba. The guy she was <b>alone</b> with in her kitchen.</p><p><em> We should get to bed</em>. <b> <em>We</em> </b> <em> should get to </em> <b> <em>bed</em></b><em>. </em></p><p>“I mean– that is, what I meant to say–”</p><p>“Calm down, Mazaki, I know what you meant. I just survived my house burning down, I’d rather not get executed by your father first thing in the morning,” he said, waving a hand at her as he rose from his chair and headed back upstairs. “Good night.”</p><p>Anzu blinked, empty tea cups in hand, as she watched Seto’s shadow melt into the darkness upstairs.</p><p><em> Did he basically say that the only reason why </em> we <em> wouldn’t go to </em> <b>bed</b> <em> together is because my </em> parents <em> are here? </em></p><p>“Hey, why do you call me ‘Mazaki’ when I have to call you ‘Seto-kun’?” Anzu hissed. There was no reply. He’d probably gone to the bathroom to brush his teeth, or else he’d headed straight to bed. But she imagined he was grinning that annoying little grin of his, just outside the guest bedroom door. </p><p><em> Cocky bastard, </em> Anzu thought… but with a smile of her own stretching the muscles in her face. She hadn’t really moved those muscles all that much during the past twelve hours. It felt weird to smile. Weird, but… good.</p><p>As Anzu headed upstairs after cleaning the tea cups, she realized that she hadn’t bothered to check if the brothers needed other blankets, or if Mokuba would even be okay sharing a bed with his brother. There was only the one guest bed, and Anzu was pretty sure the only other thing they had was a down sleeping bag shoved into the attic crawl space somewhere. Maybe one of them could stretch out on the recliner in there, facing the shallow balcony that looked in the direction of downtown Domino? It had a view of Kaiba Corp. Tower, now that she thought about it.</p><p>But maybe it was for the best if they didn’t look out the window. If they did, they’d just be reminded of everything they’d lost… and how much everything had changed beyond their control. Maybe they’d remember the ghosts that continued to haunt them.</p><p><em> No. I’d rather they both have a quiet, dreamless night’s sleep, </em> Anzu decided. They deserved that much. Mokuba for sure… and Seto, too.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0002"><h2>2. Awake</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>Anzu tries to process everything that's happened, but her thoughts take an unexpected turn.</p>
          </blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>The chamomile didn’t work.</p>
<p>It wasn’t all that surprising to Anzu, really, because how was she supposed to sleep after Seto Kaiba had, in order: showed up at her bedroom door in her father’s old gym sweats; seemed concerned when she burned her fingers on a tea kettle; asked
  about her family… and told her that her dream of going to study dance at one of the most prestigious schools in the world for the performing arts was all for nothing?</p>
<p>
  <em>No, that’s not what happened</em>.</p>
<p>What <strong>had</strong> happened was he’d told her that she already knew what was in the letter before he’d opened it. And he was right; she had: the letter from The Juilliard School was simply too small and thin to be anything but a rejection
  letter. But she thought putting it off would somehow make it less real, and make telling her parents that <em>yes, they were right about dance not being a viable career path for her</em> …. She hadn’t bothered to apply to any other universities,
  to take any other tests...</p>
<p>
  <em>“I’m sorry.”</em>
</p>
<p>Seto Kaiba apologizing to Anzu in her kitchen after midnight, after she’d collapsed on the floor, grieving the supposed death of her dream? That <strong>was</strong> a surprise. </p>
<p>He’d also had this thoughtful look on her face when she’d told him that her parents probably expected her to pursue a more “sensible” career, like something in technology or education. That Seto Kaiba cared enough to comment on her future
  prospects was another surprise.</p>
<p>
  <em>“You could be a good</em> <strong><em>anything</em></strong><em>, if you stopped limiting yourself to one school in one place, Mazaki.”</em>
</p>
<p>Anzu decided that she had enough items floating around in her head to warrant making a list. She brought out her journal, a cute pink and yellow number with Black Magician Girl on the cover that Yuugi had gotten her last year as part of a themed
  present. The clasp was meant to resemble the jewel on the Spellcaster’s outfit, and featured a unique twisting lock that Yuugi no doubt thought would make for a fun puzzle to solve each time she wanted to write in her diary. Truthfully, Anzu found
  it tiresome after the third time, so she left it unlocked. It wasn’t as if her parents were the types to snoop and read her personal stuff, anyway.</p>
<p>She brought out the coordinating glittery pink gel pen and flipped to a new page, near the back half of the book, now that it had been so long. It was possible this book wouldn’t even see her through graduation, at the rate she’d been writing in
  it lately.</p>
<p>
  <em>It’s probably for the best.</em>
</p>
<p>Regardless of whether Anzu found her way to New York, or some other dance school somewhere, the whole point was to start fresh, right? Establish herself as her own person, not the best friend of Yuugi Mutou, champion duelist, or cheerleader of
  future pro duelist Katsuya Jounouchi, or… or any of it!</p>
<p>Anzu frowned at the twinge in her stomach at these thoughts. It wasn’t as if she didn’t love the guys; she <strong>did</strong>! Why else would she show up at every single duel, or listen to them chatter and argue about the latest card releases
  and deck building strategies? But… she wasn’t a duelist. Not like them. Not really, anyway. True, there’d been a time when she could handily beat Jounouchi in a duel, but that time had long since passed.</p>
<p>She remembered that wannabe duelist, Johnny Steps, who’d challenged her to a dance off just before Battle City. Beating him despite his dirty tricks, she’d won the impromptu competition at the arcade, and had never felt lighter. And that feeling
  had nothing to do with <strong>him</strong> being there, watching her every move, or defeating Johnny in a duel when he’d basically insisted Anzu “go on a date” with him if he won.</p>
<p>The memory made her shudder.</p>
<p>But even so, she remembered her own words to Johnny: “<em>You can’t stop with one audition! I’ve been to dozens and never gotten a part, but I still keep going!</em>”</p>
<p>Ah, but it had been a while since her last audition, hadn’t it? She’d been putting everything into her Juilliard pre-screening video: choreographing it, rehearsing it, recording it, watching it, and then starting all over from the beginning. So
  here she was, back at the beginning again.</p>
<p>Anzu dated the top of her journal page and wrote in large characters WAYS IN WHICH SETO KAIBA SURPRISES ME.</p>
<ol>
  <li>
<strike>He knows the words “I’m sorry,”</strike> He apologized to me for not getting into Juilliard.</li>
</ol>
<p>She paused, wondering whether to actually write the first thought that came into her mind: <em>I didn’t realize he was empathetic.</em>
</p>
<p>Except… today was what, the fourth time he’d personally saved her life? If he didn’t understand or care for others, why would he have bothered? Anzu sighed. TIMES SETO KAIBA SAVED MY LIFE was yet another list she could make. But maybe not
  tonight. Maybe not on paper. She returned to her list of surprises.</p>
<ol>
  <li>He seems to know enough about me (or thinks he does, not sure which is weirder) to say I’d make a good teacher. Actually, he said I could be a good <strong>anything</strong>, which is probably the highest compliment I’ve ever gotten from
    anyone <strike>, even Yuugi</strike>.</li>
</ol>
<p>Why had she decided to write in pen again? Oh yes, because it was her diary and no one else was supposed to see it, let alone <strong>grade</strong> her thoughts. And to be honest… it was true. Yuugi had never once told her that she could dream
  beyond dance, that failing an audition was a sign she was meant for something different.</p>
<p>
  <em>But why would he have? It would have been like me telling him that he should stop dueling just because he lost once….</em>
</p>
<p>Except Yuugi had never truly lost, had he? <strong>Atem</strong> had lost, not once, but several times: in Duelist Kingdom against Seto Kaiba, once to Rafael when he’d let his anger cloud his judgment, and once to Yuugi, in the Ceremonial Duel….
</p>
<p>
  <em>Surrendering to Jounouchi and Rebecca doesn't count.</em>
  </p>
<p>Anzu shook her head, trying to force this depressing train of thought off-track and away from her.</p>
<ol>
  <li>He might be psychic?? I <span class="u">know</span> he’s not, it’s just he really seemed to know what I was thinking tonight. He said (paraphrased) “You have no problem calling me out on my B.S., and I have no problem calling you out on yours.” I thought I was trying not to be mean to him, especially after he lost the Kaiba Mansion, but I guess in a way, not being completely honest with him <span class="u">was</span> mean, and he knew it.</li>
</ol>
<p>
  Anzu stared at the words she’d written. Not being completely honest with Seto Kaiba was… mean? Had she ever been truly, completely honest with ANYONE before? This prompted another list:
</p>
<p>
  <strike>
    THINGS I’VE ALWAYS WANTED TO SAY BUT HAVEN’T FOR SOME REASON
  </strike>
</p>
<p>
  <strike>
    EVERYTHING I’VE NEVER TOLD ANYONE
  </strike>
</p>
<p>
  Neither of those headlines seemed accurate. Hadn’t Ninomiya-sensei said something about being “efficient” with your language, and using one word instead of two, three, four, or five? Anzu sighed again and wrote two large characters for the word
</p>
<p>
  SECRETS
</p>
<ol>
<li>Yuugi’s hair is weird, and I don’t believe him when he says it’s natural.</li>
<li>I hate being the only girl in our group. I wish Shizuka-chan transferred to Domino High, or Mai-san stayed in town, or Miho-chan hadn’t moved away. Rebecca doesn’t count. (She was annoying even before she started acting like Yuugi was her boyfriend.)</li>
<li>I hate that Yuugi never stood up to Rebecca. Or Vivian.</li>
<li>But I’m also glad, because it means</li>
</ol>
<p>
  She stopped. She’d never told <strong>anyone</strong> that she’d known —for years— that Yuugi had a crush on her. Who would she have told, anyway? Honda? <strong>Jounouchi?</strong> No doubt the boys would have crowed with delight and encouraged her to confess to Yuugi, as if <strong>she</strong> was the one with the crush.
</p>
<p>
  Except… she wasn’t. Her crush had never been on her best friend, it had been on his “other self,” the suave, confident version of Yuugi who was always serious, never “cute.” Bad enough she found out they were two different people, back in Duelist Kingdom, but to learn —on an awkward "date" that Yuugi arranged to cheer Atem up— that Yuugi’s mysterious other half was a pharaoh with a great destiny?
</p>
<p><em>It was my idea,</em>, Anzu remembered. <em>I was the one who suggested going to the museum after I saw the same symbol that was on the Puzzle...</em>. No doubt Atem would have ended up there eventually, though. That was how destiny worked.</p>
<p>
  That was when the crush crumbled, bit by bit, hour by hour. What good was it to crush on someone who could never be with you? Not fully, anyway. Not for long. Anzu wasn't the sort to pursue a doomed romance.
</p>
<p>
  <em>I just... don't have it in me, I guess.</em>
</p>
<p>
  Rejection of any kind was hard. Rejection from her dream dance school had always been a possibility, just not one Anzu chose to think about more than once or twice. She'd grown to expect rejections from auditions at this point, assuming that once she got into Juilliard and got a proper dance education, those rejections would stop completely. But if she'd kept those feelings for Atem in her heart and confessed to him, maybe before the Ceremonial Duel, and he'd rejected her then?</p>
<p>
  <em>I couldn't have—</em>
</p>
<p>
    And how to explain to Yuugi, the one whose body Atem occupied, that her feelings weren't for <strong>him</strong>, the one friend she'd known since junior high? No, Atem <strong>and</strong> Yuugi had greater destinies than anything the universe had planned for Anzu, and that meant keeping her tangle of emotions around Atem secret from everyone.
    </p>
<p>
    By the time Battle City concluded, Anzu just felt <strong>awkward</strong> around Yuugi whenever he blushed while glancing at her, or when she caught him staring at her instead of whatever else she was supposed to be doing. It was why she'd ended up paired with Seto Kaiba for chemistry lab at the start of the school year; she'd pointedly ignored Yuugi's pleading gaze, shutting down the possibility of any romantic 'accidents,' like his hand brushing against hers during an assignment, or something like that.
</p>
<p>
  Well. It wasn’t as if she’d told Seto Kaiba any of these things, so as far as her <strong>always</strong> being completely honest with him, that wasn’t completely true. Even if he’d be interested in hearing Anzu’s thoughts on Yuugi’s hair, or his relationships with other women —Duelists or otherwise! Even if the occasion had never really arisen to bring up a single one of these things....
</p>
<p>
  <em>
    Like how lonely and pathetic they make me seem?
 </em>
</p>
<p>
  Anzu sunk into her arms, crossing them over her diary. She rested her head on her forearms, staring sideways at the sad little plant in the corner of her room. It probably needed water. Or dusting. Or both.
</p>
<p>
  Her eyes felt heavy, and she knew without looking into a mirror that they’d be rimmed in red from the crying she’d promised she wouldn't do in front of Seto Kaiba, but she had anyway. Her thoughts could be exhausting, but she still didn’t feel <strong>tired</strong>. Instead, every pinprick of truth, each icy realization made her that much more awake. She turned the page and decided to start a new list.
</p>
<p>
  THINGS I CAN’T LIVE WITHOUT
</p>
<p>
  This wasn’t the same as her original idea for a 100-item gratitude list, but it felt easier. Less emotional, maybe.
</p>
<ol>
  <li> This diary. If I didn’t have a place to put all my thoughts from the last couple of years, I think I would have gone crazy a long time ago.</li>
<li>My cell phone. This is obvious, right???</li>
</ol>
<p>Anzu remembered Seto Kaiba’s words; he’d seemed abrasive, fed-up… exhausted.</p>
<p>
  <em>“...you know it’s foolish to complain about one application to one university when other people don’t even have a roof over their heads tonight?”
 </em>
</p>
<ol>
  <li>A roof over my head with a bedroom to call my own.</li>
  <li>A comfortable bed with blankets for when I want it warm or cool, and a soft pillow.</li>
  <li>Pajamas that fit me.</li>
  <li>The confidence to even <strong>try</strong> applying to a prestigious university in America, despite my parents being against it and me having to save up all the money for the application on my own.</li>
</ol>
<p>Confidence wasn’t exactly a “thing,” though. But Anzu didn’t want to cross it out. Kaiba-kun —rather, Seto-kun, as he’d insisted she call him from here on out (‘<em>Does that mean at</em>school<em>, too?’</em>)— was right.</p>
<p>Well, this was her diary, and there was no one telling her that things had to be inanimate objects in her bedroom. So Anzu added</p>
<ol>
  <li>Friends like Seto-kun who I can be completely honest with.</li>
</ol>
<p>So much for this list not being as emotional as the other ones. Anzu felt hot tears creeping up on her lash line again, and it wasn’t as if she could blame Seto Kaiba for it, as if he were staring intently at her from across her dining room table, and making her feel hot and awkward or something. No, <strong>these</strong> tears were all on her.</p>
<p>What would this list be like for him, Anzu wondered. Would the only item on it be Mokuba?</p>
<p>That was impossible, right? Surely Seto Kaiba recognized that he needed other things to get by, even if… even if the only home he’d known for the past nine years had burnt to the ground tonight.</p>
<p>He needed his company. It was his reason for being, his purpose. The richer and more powerful Kaiba Corporation got, Anzu knew, the more orphaned children Seto Kaiba could save from the bleak existence he and his brother had after their birth
  parents died.</p>
<p>He… needed his jet, didn’t he? To fly to all those countries where he planned on establishing Kaiba Lands. But had it burned in the fire?</p>
<p>
  <em>Wouldn’t he have gotten in trouble if he kept something with jet fuel in a residential neighborhood?</em>
</p>
<p>It wasn’t as if she’d seen the Blue-Eyes White Jet parked on the sidewalk or anything. It also wasn’t the sort of thing that could perch delicately on the helipads dotting the tallest skyscrapers in Domino… including Kaiba Corporation Tower. He
  must keep it in a separate facility, Anzu decided.</p>
<p>Ah, but what about that jacket of his? Anzu found herself attempting to doodle Seto Kaiba’s Battle City jacket in the margins of her diary, the way she’d designed dreamy dance costumes and outfits she hoped to own someday —back when she had time
  for that kind of thing.</p>
<p>
  <em>Let’s see, it had a really high collar…</em>
</p>
<p>Anzu grinned. No doubt Seto-kun would not be happy at the prospect of his custom-designed “battle suit” sketched in a girl’s diary using a sparkly pink gel pen. But he wasn’t ever going to read this, so what did it matter? Besides, the lining was kind of pinkish anyway, wasn’t it? A sort of dusky rose color, if Anzu remembered correctly. And how could she not? He’d worn it throughout Battle City, and again when they met again during…</p>
<p>
  <em>During Dartz’s attacks.</em>
</p>
<p>He’d saved her life then, too. An enormous tidal wave would have destroyed the Kaiba Corporation helicopter that had taken them as close to Atlantis as they could have gotten….</p>
<p>
  <em>And if Seto-kun</em> —God, that still sounded strange, even in her own mind!— <em>hadn’t ordered us to leave when we did, we all would have drowned.</em>
</p>
<p>Anzu remembered that back then, she’d been furious at him, furious that he was willing to leave Yuugi behind. But none of them knew where Yuugi was. He hadn’t come back through the portal in the temple, and….</p>
<p>She exhaled deeply. Enough thinking about that.</p>
<p>Weren’t there some weird flaps on the sides of the jacket? Maybe they were meant to evoke the horned protrusions on the Blue-Eyes White Dragon. Were the giant shoulder pads meant to be wings, then? The thought made Anzu giggle.</p>
<p>She sobered a moment later, remembering the only reason why she was sketching Seto Kaiba’s iconic Battle City outfit was because she had no idea if it had burnt to cinders with the rest of his home. No, not home, his <strong>house</strong>. He’d been
  pretty clear about that when describing the place as <em>Gozaburo Kaiba’s mansion</em>.</p>
<p>Anzu moved her pen back up to her last list item. In characters as small as she could make them, she wrote “though I think his ‘battle suit’ is kind of silly-looking. He looks a LOT better in a suit! ♥”</p>
<p>She almost scribbled it out.</p>
<p>Almost.</p>
<p>But after a moment, Anzu decided if she was all that worried about someone reading her diary and finding out that yes, she thought Seto Kaiba was attractive, she would just start locking the damn thing again. And maybe hiding it in a box. Under
  her bed. Covered by an out-of-season quilt or something.</p>
<p>So: mansion burned down, casualties may have included Seto Kaiba’s trenchcoat, for better or for worse.</p>
<p>
  <em>I hope he has insurance…</em> Anzu thought. <em>I mean, he</em> has <em>to, right? What kind of businessman would he be without it?</em>
</p>
<p>Not like it would solve everything, as Anzu knew. The house she’d lived in with her family as a little girl had flooded after a smaller earthquake busted a water main some eleven years ago. While Anzu hadn’t understood the specifics, she knew how
  to write the character for “insurance” years ahead of her classmates because she’d seen it at home so often, written on what seemed like every scrap of paper in their modest home. The whole ordeal had motivated her parents to seek out a new build
  that was supposed to give them fewer headaches when it came to insuring a home against Japan’s all-too-frequent earthquakes.</p>
<p>Quakes like today’s, which had resulted in the destruction of Seto and Mokuba Kaiba’s house, but only the slightest mess in the Mazaki home.</p>
<p>
  <em>Did he lose any staff members?</em> Isono didn’t live at the Kaiba Mansion, right? Anzu knew that the Kaiba brothers employed a household staff, but they had to have made it out before the fire got bad. Kaiba didn’t hire anyone he didn’t think was
  competent, reactive, and trustworthy; they were undoubtedly his prerequisites for any job, from secretaries and maids at the mansion to the people who probably handed out balloons at Kaiba Land.</p>
<p>Was that long white coat of his proprietary? <em>Maybe the reason why Seto-kun —nope, still sounds weird— wore it so often was because he was promoting some special Kaiba Corporation wearable technology?</em>
</p>
<p>She wouldn’t put it past him. Kaiba Corporation was known for its Duel Disks and other entertainment gaming technology, but she also knew they owned hotels near Kaiba Lands, like the one in America. Who knew what other industries the Kaiba
  brothers were involved in?</p>
<p>Anzu flipped over her Black Magician Girl diary, curious if there was some copyright on it that could indicate affiliation with Kaiba Corporation, but the only fine print was a copyright notice for I², Pegasus’ company that oversaw all Duel
  Monsters licensing.</p>
<p>
  <em>Maybe fashion, then?</em> It would make sense, if the coat wasn’t something exclusive to him, but was a billowing advertisement for Kaiba Corporation’s technological prowess.</p>
<p>Anzu found herself adding to her original pink outline of Seto Kaiba’s famed “battle suit,” this time with a glittery blue pen that she used to doodle the black turtleneck with its completely unnecessary buckling straps on the sleeves and
  coordinating ones on the slim-fitting pant legs.</p>
<p>
  <em>Oh and the studs! I’m pretty sure there were studs here, too….</em>
</p>
<p>She made it as far as outlining the rather obnoxiously-sized belt buckle she remembered, her cheeks pinking as she did so. Anzu had unsuccessfully tried to convince herself earlier that she didn’t spend any particular amount of time looking at
  Seto Kaiba’s lips, except she’d paid an awful lot of attention to them this evening when he’d smiled —or smirked, as it may well have been; it wasn’t as if she was going to get caught <strong>staring</strong>— but she did remember "noticing" that belt buckle back on the Battle Ship.</p>
<p>It was so large that Anzu found herself wondering why. Did it house a small computer for interfacing with his Duel Disk? Did he keep bubblegum in there?</p>
<p>Anzu could see it now: <em>“I’m here to kick ass and chew bubblegum… and I’m all out of bubblegum.”</em> Of course, Seto Kaiba had never said anything so ridiculous, but she could picture him saying it nonetheless. It was probably a cheesy line
  out of some old movie she’d watched, but it just seemed to <strong>fit</strong> him. Anzu realized she was smiling while thinking about Seto Kaiba –again. How did he have this much power over her, to make her go from terrified to safe, from
  grateful to worried, from distraught to proud, maybe even a little embarrassed, all in the span of a single day?</p>
<p>Then it occurred to her: what if it was where he kept his Duel Monsters cards when he wasn’t using a Duel Disk? Yuugi had a belt with a custom leather duel box on it, so it wasn't outside the realm of reason. What if Kaiba's belt buckle was actually some sort of steel box with a fingerprint sensor on it, so that only he could open it? What if—</p>
<p>
  <em>Oh no.</em>
</p>
<p>Domino High’s uniform code didn’t permit fancy belts or other accessories. That hadn’t stopped Yuugi from wearing a studded collar and attaching a giant chain with the Millennium Puzzle on it, but Anzu honestly thought Yuugi somehow charmed all
  their teachers into not saying anything.</p>
<p>
  <em>But Seto-kun?</em> The few times Anzu could recall seeing him at school —before Egypt— she didn’t remember seeing the oversized KC belt buckle. She felt sure she would have noticed, as embarrassing as that thought was. And since she <strong>hadn’t</strong>
  noticed, that meant that either the giant belt buckle wasn’t actually a deck box, or…</p>
<p>
  <em>Or Seto Kaiba lost his signature Blue-Eyes cards along with everything else today.</em>
</p>
<p>It was one thing to think she could be completely honest with Seto Kaiba, asking prying questions about his abusive late adoptive father <em>.</em> But to ask him if he hadn’t just lost his home, his famous coat, and who knows what else, but the
  thing that kept him tied to Yuugi, to Duel Monsters, to everything?</p>
<p>Anzu would rather get a dozen —no, two dozen!— rejection letters from every dance school on the planet.</p>
  </div></div>
<a name="section0003"><h2>3. Overboard</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_head_notes"><b>Summary for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff">
            <p>It started with croissants, which, in retrospect, was probably a bad thing to try and make at 2:57 a.m. Anzu didn't care.<br/>Or, Anzu avoids sleep and it catches up with her, anyway. Seto makes plans that could backfire spectacularly.</p>
          </blockquote><b>Notes for the Chapter:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>This might better fit the the 30kisses LJ community theme #27 “overflow” than the previous two chapters of Tremors, but this also happens to fit (in an equally subtle way), one of the themes for Azure Week 2020, theme #8, “excuse me” —one of those fabulously vague themes that can be interpreted six ways to Sunday. Tell me how you think either of those themes show up in this chapter. I’d love to hear your thoughts.</p></blockquote></div><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>It started with croissants, which, in retrospect, was probably a bad thing to try and make at 2:57 a.m. when Anzu had no experience baking anything French, let alone a breakfast pastry. She used up the majority of the Mazaki household’s butter supply, but she didn’t care.</p>
<p>She pulled a few vegetables from the refrigerator and opted to make some pickled vegetables with vinegar and sugar, knowing her father’s tastes for meals tended toward the traditional. They had some fish leftover that she could try and grill –or something– a bit later, so in the meantime, maybe she could make some rice balls? And some pancakes, too.</p>
<p>
  <em>We have chocolate chips in one of these cabinets, don’t we?</em>
</p>
<p>Anything to keep her busy. Keep her downstairs, away from her bed, where she’d lain, eyes open, for a good hour after Kaiba <em>—Seto-kun!—</em> left her downstairs with her mind racing. First he’d insisted she call him by his given name, and then he’d gone and acknowledged her embarrassing Freudian slip —“<b><em>We </em></b><em>should get to </em><b><em>bed</em></b><em>”—</em> by saying that he didn’t want to get executed by her father first thing in the morning by <b>sleeping with her</b>! As if it was the most natural thing to say after she’d accidentally implied that they were– that they were—!</p>
<p>It didn’t matter if it was below freezing outside; Anzu felt hot all over, she felt congested from crying, and every time she closed her eyes, the same nightmarish images bore into her brain: cement bricks falling, two, three, ten at a time. They shattered into piercing shards and crumbed into ash. It filled her lungs, choking her. Nagakura-sensei smiled warmly and pat Anzu on the shoulder, heedless of Anzu’s distress, and joined Atem. The two of them wrapped their arms around the other’s shoulders and held their opposite thumbs up. Then they disappeared through a doorway flooded with light, never to be seen again.</p>
<p>She’d bolted upright after that, unable to close her eyes for more than a minute.</p>
<p>While the croissant dough was resting between folds, Anzu decided to steam a kabocha squash. It would take close to a half hour before <em>that</em> would be ready, so she started on miso soup, removing the red soybean paste from the fridge along with some dried black kelp for the broth.</p>
<p><em>Does Mokuba like hot dog octopuses?</em> He was almost 13 years old, Anzu knew, so maybe he’d consider himself too old for something so cute. But Anzu liked them, so she boiled a small batch and used a thin paring knife to slice the sausages and carve small faces into the casing.</p>
<p>
  <em>Is a group of octopuses a school? No, wait, aren’t they solitary?</em>
</p>
<p>For some reason, Anzu pictured a blue-ringed octopus with Seto’s eyes and, inexplicably, his hair, bobbing around on a seabed. The image made her snort, but there was no one around to hear the embarrassing noise.</p>
<p>It was a welcome kind of quiet. It wasn’t like the quiet before everything fell apart. But it could quickly become that kind of quiet, if she let it. So Anzu went back to cooking.</p>
<p>The little hot dog octopuses went well with rolled egg omelettes. She was sure there was some ham she could use to wrap them with, just so they wouldn’t be boring-looking yellow ovals. Oh, and omurice. It was always fun to draw with ketchup, Anzu remembered, and it would be a good way to use up the wrinkled bell peppers lying around.</p>
<p>Before long, Anzu had made herself a piping hot extra-large mug of green tea, sipping from it every few minutes as she added increasingly more items to her “ideal breakfast” menu: rice porridge, a small portion of fish, omurice, both plain egg rolls and some wrapped with strips of ham, miso soup, pickled vegetables, a daikon-carrot salad, simmered kabocha topped with slivers of ginger, sliced fruit, pancakes, a pitcher of yuzu juice, a pot of coffee, both green and black tea in separate teapots, some vaguely crescent-shaped croissants, some pickled plums…</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Whoa.”</p>
<p>The next morning, after racing his brother down the Mazaki home’s too-narrow stairway, Mokuba skid to a halt in the kitchen entryway. He’d barely made it to the room when Seto bumped into him from behind, still rubbing the sleep from his eyes.</p>
<p>“Mokuba, why did you st—” Seto’s eyes opened wide as took in the scene before him: every single flat surface covered with different dishes of food, the aromas blending into something distantly familiar.</p>
<p>“Good morning, boys,” Mrs. Mazaki greeted them. “I wish we could stick around to chat, but Ietsugu and I have to head to work.” She smiled apologetically as she pulled on a high-heeled shoe in the entryway, while Mr. Mazaki put his arm through a suit jacket sleeve.</p>
<p>“Emergency call-in,” he explained, “Government contracts and that kind of thing. You understand, right?” He nodded at Seto, who blinked, forcing the tiredness pulling on his eyelids away. He nodded at Mr. Mazaki without replying.</p>
<p>“And our firm is helping to relocate people from the branches near Fukushima, so—” Mrs. Mazaki shrugged apologetically. “In any case, please, eat. Anzu made enough food to feed a small army.”</p>
<p>“You barely ate, Mom,” Anzu replied, her arms buried in a sink filled –somehow– with even more dishes covered in soap bubbles. Her voice was a far cry from what it had sounded like last night, hissing at Seto over the use of his given name compared to his use of her surname. It almost sounded like her head was underwater, not her hands.</p>
<p>“You know I don’t eat that much in the morning, and you made so much! I still don’t understand what got into you.” She looked back at Anzu, her brows knit upward on her forehead.</p>
<p><em>She’s worried</em>, Seto realized. He didn’t exactly have a lot of memories of his mother’s face, so the only reason why he recognized the look on Mrs. Mazaki’s face was because he’d seen Anzu make it before: at Pegasus’ castle, at various points throughout Battle City, on that godforsaken chunk of rock the others called “Atlantis,” back in Egypt… and most recently, yesterday, in those moments right before a chaos of a different kind consumed their world.</p>
<p>“Well <em>I </em>ate my fill,” Mr. Mazaki said, either unaware of the expression on his wife’s face or trying to divert her worries elsewhere. The barrel-chested man beamed at his daughter, giving her a thumbs up with both hands. “Best breakfast I’ve had in a long time, Anzu,” he glanced back at his wife, who had crossed her arms over her chest and raised an eyebrow at him. The tips of his ears reddened. “Oh, I mean– that is to say, best breakfast <b>you’ve</b> ever made me!”</p>
<p>Anzu turned from the sink to look at her parents, and it was then Seto saw the shadowy crescents underneath her eyes. “Ha ha, Dad. This is probably the first time I’ve <b>ever</b> made you breakfast.” She turned back to the sink, gripping a scrubbing sponge as she went over each segment of wire on a baking rack. “But thanks,” she added, softly. Seto didn’t think either of the Mazaki parents heard. They were already shuffling towards the door.</p>
<p>“Help her eat some of that food, would you two? It’ll probably go bad otherwise.” Mrs. Mazaki smiled at Seto and Mokuba, still standing in their borrowed gym uniforms near the kitchen entryway. “We’ll catch up with you later, okay? Anzu, give us a call if anybody needs anything. We can try and get some things on the way home.”</p>
<p>“Okay, Mom,” Anzu said, her voice echoing more into the soapy sink than it did out to her parents.</p>
<p>Mrs. Mazaki hesitated in the doorway before running up to Anzu and kissing her on the cheek. “I love you, honey. Try and take a second to eat, okay? Those dishes aren’t going anywhere.”</p>
<p>She waved her fingers at Seto and Mokuba, and then followed Mr. Mazaki out the front door.</p>
<p>Soon the only sound was the <em>slish-slish</em> of Anzu moving her hand rhythmically in and out of the water, washing one thing after another. There was a small stainless steel mountain of utensils, pots, pans, and various cooking implements beside her that couldn't fit in the two-tier drying rack crammed in the space between the sink and the refrigerator.</p>
<p>“This spread’s better than the Bellagio,” Mokuba whispered, still in awe of all the food. He lurched forward, finally, and set upon a plate covered, strangely enough, with a glass bowl. He gingerly removed the steamed-up bowl and his eyes lit up: <em>chocolate chip pancakes</em>!</p>
<p>“The what now?” Anzu asked over her shoulder. She gestured to Seto with her elbow at one of the smaller drawers near her; he opened it and pulled out a pair of forks and butter knives for himself and Mokuba and sat down at the crowded table.</p>
<p>“Hotel in Las Vegas,” Seto replied, trying to identify each dish he saw. There were the Western staples of breakfast: pancakes, fruit, scrambled eggs, and a small pitcher of some kind of fruit juice, but a substantial amount of Japanese food, too: rice porridge with what looked like honey drizzled on top and ginger (he could smell it from a half meter away) mixed in, miso soup that had settled to the bottom of several small bowls, some kind of brightly-colored salad, and a dish of pungent pickled...something.</p>
<p>
  <em>Am I supposed to eat from the serving plates?</em>
</p>
<p>There wasn’t enough room for a dish of his own, he supposed. As soon as he handed Mokuba the utensils, his younger brother went to town on the pancakes, smearing them with a generous helping of butter from a small bowl hiding among all the larger platters and dishes.</p>
<p>“Hey, Anzu, do you have any syrup?”</p>
<p>“Mm, maple syrup’s in the microwave,” she murmured. “I wanted it to keep warm.” She withdrew her hands from the sink long enough to dry them off on a towel hanging from the straps of the light pink apron tied around her waist. Her fingertips resembled raisins. Anzu plucked a small carafe from the microwave and tilted its spout toward an index finger. A drop of syrup touched it, and Anzu’s tongue shot out to lick it away.</p>
<p><em>There are better ways of checking whether your syrup’s warm!</em> Seto thought. He could feel his neck and ears heating up. He chose instead to focus on the array of dishes before him. Mokuba was right: it may have been a while since they’d last stayed at the Las Vegas hotel and sampled from the famous buffet, but the sheer variety of options before them teetered on the edge of mind-boggling.</p>
<p>Judging by the Mazaki parents’ reactions, their daughter cooking breakfast at all—let alone enough to “feed a small army,” as her mother had put it—was not <b>normal</b>.</p>
<p>“Still good,” Anzu said, setting the carafe down in a small gap between what was now Mokuba’s plate of chocolate chip pancakes and a dish with a variety of rolled eggs and rice balls on it. She looked like she was trying to smile, but it didn’t quite reach her eyes.</p>
<p>“Do you want coffee, Kai–” she stopped herself and her cheeks reddened. She bowed her head and refused to meet his amused gaze; instead, she looked up at him through the curtain of her bangs. “Or do you prefer tea?”</p>
<p>A smirk tugged at the corners of Seto’s lips. She couldn’t bring herself to use his given name. She’d said it last night, but she couldn’t say it now, not in the presence of his brother.</p>
<p>
  <em>I should have known.</em>
</p>
<p>Except… how could he have known? For all the madness that regularly flung Anzu and Seto together—with Yuugi and Jounouchi, inevitably, and others, typically—there seemed to be a great deal he still didn’t –<em>couldn’t?</em>– understand about her.</p>
<p>“I can get it,” Seto said, rising from his chair. He didn’t expect Anzu to push him down firmly by the shoulder, given how exhausted she looked. He assumed she wouldn’t have had the energy to bother.</p>
<p>“Coffee or tea?” she repeated. Anzu wasn’t looking at him. She seemed to be staring at the wallpaper across on the wall leading toward the living room. But whatever she was <b>seeing</b>– that was something else altogether.</p>
<p>“Black coffee’s fine,” Seto acquiesced. It was one thing to have employees wordlessly bring you coffee. Sometimes they even bobbed their heads nervously around him, like those little dolls people sometimes put on the dashboards of their cars. <em>Here’s your coffee, Mr. Kaiba. </em>And then they’d run away like little mice. But this? From Mazaki? It felt… wrong.</p>
<p>Anzu turned and made her way to an electric kettle that just finished boiling. She poured a steady stream of hot water through a pour-over strainer fitted with a paper filter and into a cup. A heady aroma wafted towards Seto: notes of chocolate, black cherry, and an unknown spice. He could feel his mouth watering even before she placed the dark blue Domino University mug down in another small gap between the plates on the table.</p>
<p>The school’s ridiculous mascot, a panda that went by the name of “Domi-guo,” emblazoned the side. Its name was meant to be a pun off the name “Domino” and the Japanese word for a bear’s roar. Seto wasn’t sure pandas made the same sound as regular bears, but he wasn’t about to point that out to anyone even loosely affiliated with the university, lest they roar in his face or something.</p>
<p><em>The coffee’s clearly not instant</em>, Seto realized approvingly. Of course, it wasn’t as if she’d prepared it just for <b>him</b>. The house had to have coffee around; there was no way Mazaki could have gone anywhere at 2 o’clock in the morning to get coffee beans and a grinder. After all, it was one thing to take them in like this, but to go even further…?</p>
<p>Then again, Anzu already had gone further than he ever would have expected. The proof was in the pour-over, at least.</p>
<p>Seto expected her to turn back around and go back to her dishes, even though it was clear that she needed to sit down and eat something, if not get some rest.</p>
<p>
  <em>Has she slept at all?</em>
</p>
<p>Considering there were actual croissants—and were those sliced almonds on the outside?—on the table, Seto doubted it. None of the food on the table looked like it had been reheated or pulled from a box, and he wasn’t about to check the trash can in front of her. Even if he was wrong about the meal, he knew what else was in the garbage: heartbreak in paper form, ripped into shreds and covered with chicken grease. Mazaki didn’t seem like the type to “get over it” overnight.</p>
<p>Instead of going back to the sink, Anzu stood there, wobbling ever so slightly. Seto pulled out the chair beside him and reached up to her shoulder so he could press her into the seat. She almost slipped when her legs gave out sooner than he’d expected; maybe all the grace she had left her last night after he’d read that letter and told her that she hadn’t gotten accepted into Juilliard.</p>
<p>Anzu blinked, her head pitching forward slightly as her eyes widened. “Oh, sorry, I got… a little lost in thought, I guess. I should get back to the dishes—”</p>
<p>Again he reached out. This time Anzu turned to him, a question in her eyes.</p>
<p>“Sit.” He wasn’t trying to <b>command</b> her or anything, but a split second after the word left his mouth, an acrid taste coated his tongue. This was <em>Mazaki</em>; of course she would take it the wrong way. She’d spent a good chunk of time last night doing just that, after all. A lack of sleep wasn’t going to make her think any clearer about this awkward situation they were in.</p>
<p>To Seto’s surprise, Anzu inhaled sharply through her nose and nodded once, like she’d made some mental decision to not snap at him like she normally did. Though, “normal” was relative, after yesterday.</p>
<p>
  <em>After… everything.</em>
</p>
<p>She sat and for the first time, seemed to actually <b>see</b> some of what she’d put together: omurice here, little sausages there— Seto wondered, <em>were they supposed to be octopuses or something?</em> <em>Why else would they be cut up so strangely?</em>—along with a bottle of ketchup and some seaweed seasoning. Seto helped himself to one of the other plates of pancakes, these plain, along with a selection of rolled eggs and fruit.</p>
<p>“You should eat,” he said, and then he opted to practice what he preached, so to speak. He wedged the side of his fork into the golden pancake, stabbed the tines into the slice, and lifted it to his mouth. He glanced at Anzu, whose gaze had drifted now, to him. She seemed to be staring at his lips.</p>
<p>Seto popped the fork into his mouth, but his ability to eat and hold Anzu’s gaze diminished as soon as the taste of the pancake hit him. It was quite possibly the butteriest, perfectly tangy pancake he’d had in years. And he had a personal chef who liked to go overboard every Sunday morning for an ostentatious brunch.</p>
<p><em>‘</em>Had<em>’ being the operative word</em>.</p>
<p>The man himself was fine; none of the Kaiba Mansion household staff <b>lived</b> there. Or at least, they hadn’t for years, since Seto had taken over Kaiba Corporation. But the chef had still worked at the mansion for eight to twelve hours a day, in a kitchen that Seto had taken no small amount of pride in keeping up-to-date with the latest appliances. He’d never gotten around to actually gutting the place and updating it completely, but that was a moot point now, wasn’t it?</p>
<p>Seto preferred not to think about everything he’d lost yesterday –<b>again</b>– and instead focused on eating his pancakes before Mokuba would think to steal them off his plate. And he would, Seto knew, judging by how quickly he’d gone through the chocolate chip ones and was now inhaling the scrambled eggs. A quick glance at Anzu revealed she was still sitting beside him, still quivering ever-so-slightly, but now a tiny smile crinkled the corners of her eyes. The shadows underneath them seemed a fraction less prominent.</p>
<p>A moment later, Anzu sighed and pulled a croissant from a plate and bit into one flaky corner. Her eyes widened, as if she were surprised by her own baking talent.</p>
<p>“These turned out okay,” she murmured.</p>
<p>“‘<em>These</em>?’” Mokuba repeated, once he’d finished swallowing the latest of whatever had been on the third plate to Seto’s left. It was empty now, with nary a crumb to indicate what it had held only moments before. “What are you talking about, Anzu, <b>all</b> of this is amazing!”</p>
<p>She bowed her head down again, which Seto realized meant she was embarrassed.</p>
<p>
  <em>Funny, I never took her for the humble sort.</em>
</p>
<p>She’d always met his intentionally intense gazes head-on, refusing to blink where others cowered or looked away. Seto had seen her blush before—back at Pegasus’ castle, and in that damned Virtual World—but then, it wasn’t because someone had just complimented her.</p>
<p><em>No</em>, he remembered, <em>it was because I</em>—</p>
<p>Another forkful of pancake. He added a slice of mikan orange underneath it, just for variety’s sake. The flavors melded particularly well, and served to distract him from his own meandering train of thought.</p>
<p>“Thank you,” Anzu whispered, but only after she’d spent a few minutes chewing on her croissant, heedless of the snow of layered pastry that rained onto her lap. “I should get back to washing everything. I’ll need to pack up all these leftovers somehow.”</p>
<p>“I’ll eat more so you don’t have much to pack!” Mokuba piped up again. Of course he would think that was an ideal solution. Seto rolled his eyes, but neither his brother nor Anzu commented on it.</p>
<p>For the next several minutes, the only sounds were of Mokuba eating (it was impossible to chew quietly with the sheer amount of food he was cramming into his mouth), and the <em>slish</em>-<em>slish</em> of Anzu washing more dishes, pausing, drying a few dishes here, putting away a few more there. For every item she put away, she seemed to take two more out. A pot replaced with a square glass container; a baking tray substituted with a plastic tub missing its lid. Eventually she’d amassed a small collection of containers and an assortment of multicolored lids on a countertop off to the side of the kitchen table, but she’d wandered back to the sink before putting anything in them.</p>
<p>The sink somehow still foamed with soap bubbles, but considering the pile of still-drying bowls and pans next to Anzu, Seto didn’t see how there could possibly be <b>more</b> in there for her to wash. And why didn’t they have a dishwasher? This place had seemed like a new enough build from what little he remembered of the outside from his arrival last night….</p>
<p>Seto started to stand after collecting the few plates he’d eaten. That was when he saw Anzu stumble slightly: leaning against the sink, it was an almost imperceptible movement, but for the forward thrust of her shoulders. Her hands emerged from the soapy water, one hand holding a chef’s knife while the other—</p>
<p>“Stop.”</p>
<p>His chair made an obnoxiously loud squeak against the kitchen flooring as he bolted upright. He hadn’t really thought about what he was doing; he’d just wrapped his arms around Anzu and pulled her hands apart before she could slice her hand open with the knife. She seemed completely oblivious to the fact that it wasn’t a sponge she held in her other hand, but a sopping wet, thin fabric produce bag, the kind used when washing a bunch of freshly purchased vegetables or fruits before using them in a meal.</p>
<p>Anzu jerked back and looked up at him, startled. “What? I—” He pried the knife from one of her hands, releasing his grip on her wrist to do so. He hadn’t ever held her—held anyone, really—like this before. She’d always seemed like such a substantial presence: wherever Yuugi went, there she was, bright and shining. But in his arms right now, she seemed slight. Frail, even. It made no sense.</p>
<p>“You almost cut yourself open, you’re so exhausted,” he murmured. He’d wanted to keep his voice low, but it wasn’t as if the morning radio were on or anything. After that squeaky chair, only the sink <em>drip-dripping</em> made a sound.</p>
<p>“Anzu, are you okay?” Mokuba shot up from his seat, half an octopus sausage still dangling out of one corner of his mouth. If he’d noticed the cute faces Anzu had carved into them, he hadn’t mentioned it. Instead, he sucked the remainder of the sausage into his mouth and stumbled over his chair and the one beside him, trying to check on Anzu, his eyes wide with worry.</p>
<p>Anzu blinked and shook her head back and forth, as if exhaustion was the sort of thing you could fling away from yourself. “I’m fi–”</p>
<p>“You’re not fine. You’re exhausted. Get some sleep,” Seto interrupted, his tone brooking no argument.</p>
<p>“How did you—” Anzu mumbled, actually staggering this time, backwards into his chest. He spun her around to face him, keeping the grip on her shoulders firm.</p>
<p>“You look like a raccoon,” he said. “Your eyes are bloodshot, you’ve got bags underneath them, and you’re shaking like a leaf. And now you’re going to pretend like you’re not about to pass out?”</p>
<p>“I’m not, I…” Anzu stopped herself. Her voice dropped to a thin, dull whisper. “How did you know?”</p>
<p>Seto shrugged, his arms falling to his sides, the electric tingle in his palms subsiding. Anzu wobbled forward, but she didn’t fall.</p>
<p>“Big Brother’s no stranger to staying up all night,” Mokuba piped up. “I should tell you about the time I switched his coffee to decaf right before the Duel Disk II launch so he could get some sleep.” He chuckled a little too loudly, likely trying to diffuse the tension that suddenly filled the room. Off Seto’s sidelong glare, Mokuba quickly amended, “But only after <b>you</b> get some rest!”</p>
<p>Anzu seemed to realize this was an argument she couldn't win. She sighed again and started to pull on the straps of her apron, groaning audibly when the knot stubbornly refused to come undone. Again Seto placed his hands on her shoulders, but this time he pivoted her gently, his hands drifting to her waist so his deft fingers could work at the Cthulhulian knot she’d somehow tied around her waist.</p>
<p>Once undone, he draped the apron over a chair, unsure of where it was meant to go and, for the time being, anyway, not caring.</p>
<p>“Mokuba, clean up your plates and start putting the leftovers away, please.”</p>
<p>“Okay, Big Brother,” Mokuba replied and set to work. Seto lucked out; Mokuba had agreed without putting up a fight. He’d been… more stubborn, lately. Breakfast the day before at the Kaiba Mansion felt as pleasant as a quarterly revenue meeting with Kaiba Corporation’s executives. Then the earthquake changed everything. Mokuba was still Mokuba, he just seemed more <b>obedient</b> over the past sixteen hours.</p>
<p>“Oh man, I’ve got such a food coma…” Seto and Anzu heard Mokuba complain as they headed toward the staircase. Anzu didn’t seem to take offense to the statement, if the tiny smile pulling at the corner of her lips was any indication. She glanced back at Mokuba shuffling around the table before she headed upstairs, Seto following closely behind.</p>
<p>Halfway up, Anzu glanced back at him. “You don’t have to escort me to my bedroom, you know.”</p>
<p>“You’re no better than Mokuba,” Seto replied archly, “If I tell you to go to bed and I don’t make sure you do, you’ll just find something else to keep you awake.”</p>
<p>
  <em>What would that be, for Mazaki? More sit-ups, perhaps?</em>
</p>
<p>Anzu snorted a puff of air out of her nose, and Seto thought he saw the ghost of a smirk on her face before she turned away and continued heading up the stairs. She didn’t say anything as he followed her down the hall and through her door. He’d glanced in last night, when she’d started <em>thump-thumping</em> on the shared wall between their rooms with her late-night exercise routine. But he hadn’t actually looked around.</p>
<p>The room suited her. Bright, with a full-sized Western bed and desk, all in bold colors: sunshine yellow walls, an ocean blue desk with a matching uncomfortable-looking chair, and fuschia curtains to match her—um, perhaps a <b>bit</b> outdated—orange and pink checkered comforter. She had a pair of <em>Black Magician Girl: Jewel of the Sage</em> Broadway posters pinned to her wall, and a calendar above her desk. A somewhat sad little plant—Seto couldn’t tell if it was real or fake from this distance—sat in the corner, its leaves faintly dusted with gray.</p>
<p>Anzu threw back the comforter without any fanfare and crawled in, pulling everything up to her nose. “I just… I needed to do something,” she whispered, her voice muffled by the various sheets and blankets. “The food, it– it was all I could think of. That’s all.”</p>
<p>Seto considered what to say. “If you can’t even tell when you’re about to slice your hand open—” he began, then course-corrected. “You’ve already done something. A lot of somethings, actually.”</p>
<p>“But—” Anzu started to protest, tossing back her comforter as if to get out of bed, at which point Seto came fully into the room and pushed her down into the bed. He didn’t realize that his previous gesture—firmly gripping Anzu by the shoulders—worked very differently in a bedroom. At some point in the past few breaths, he’d put a knee up on the edge of the bed to keep his balance, but now he was pinning Anzu to the bed, and she was staring up at him, wide-eyed and flushed, unable to do that thing where she bowed her head and tried to hide behind her bangs.</p>
<p>He swallowed. Her eyes followed the movement of his Adam’s apple in his throat, but flicked away to who-knew-what as soon as his gaze shifted from her eyes down the curve of her neck to his hands, fixed on her shoulders.</p>
<p>“What more do you need me to say, Mazaki?” Seto sighed and removed his hands from her shoulders. They tingled slightly, like they were already missing Anzu’s warmth. He chalked it up to his hands falling asleep because of… something. He shifted to a sitting position and flicked his hands a few times, hoping the fuzzy feeling in them would go away.</p>
<p>He had no right to be in here, no right to sit on the edge of her bed and act like— like <b>Yuugi</b> or something.</p>
<p>“Don’t call me that.”</p>
<p>The crisp clarity of her tone startled him; he’d thought she was teetering on the edge of exhaustion, but she’d managed to get those words out sounding like she was reciting an answer in class, loud enough for even the idiots in the back row to hear.</p>
<p>
  <em>Of course she’d throw my words back at me.</em>
</p>
<p>It was her way, wasn’t it? No, maybe not <b>her</b> way, but <b>their</b> way. Back and forth it went, for more than a year now. Could it be considered routine by now? Or was “habit” a better word? Regardless—</p>
<p><em>Two can play </em>that<em> game.</em></p>
<p>“What do you want me to call you, then?” Seto deliberately dropped his voice—not a whisper, but not a grumble or a growl, either. He could still hear Mokuba clattering away downstairs, so it wasn’t as if he was worried that his brother would hear this “conversation.” Instead, this was purely for his—no, wrong again: <b>their</b>—benefit.</p>
<p>He could lean back over her. Trap her between his arms again and hover just over her, just to see the look on her face. As for right now, her expression was… something. He didn’t know the word for her expression off the top of his head. It wasn’t <b>cute</b> or <b>embarrassing</b> or anything so basic. But for all his education, Seto couldn’t find the right way to describe it.</p>
<p>“‘A-Anzu,’” she said in a stuttering whisper. “It’s only fair...Seto-kun.”</p>
<p>He raised an eyebrow at her and nodded once. “Very well. What more do you need me to say, <em>Anzu</em>?” He deliberately left off an honorific, knowing exactly how she’d react. And true to expectation, she blushed brilliantly this time, a few shades off from matching her obnoxiously bright bed covering.</p>
<p>“Just promise me you won’t leave without saying anything,” she said, the words coming out hoarse. “Cooking is one thing, but I—”</p>
<p>She needed to help everyone. Help <b>more</b>. Unsurprising. Trying to stop Anzu from helping someone in need would be as plausible as him… well, as him dueling Yuugi again and winning, to be honest: a futile effort, most likely.</p>
<p>“Fine,” Seto responded, standing. He didn’t like where his thoughts went. He had too much to actually get <b>done</b> before he could pursue that line of thinking.</p>
<p>“Promise me, Seto-kun!” That desperate tone. She’d used it on him only once, back in the Virtual World. Back before—</p>
<p>“<em>We want to help...Let us help...Please!”</em></p>
<p>He almost shook his head a few times, about to do the exact thing he believed was a ridiculous gesture on Anzu’s part just minutes ago. You couldn’t fling bad thoughts out of your head any more than you could shake exhaustion out. She’d misinterpret the motion, in any case.</p>
<p>“I promise.” The words came out harsher than he’d intended, and he turned to glance at Anzu, to see if she was staring at him with her eyes wide and watering, like one of those sad-looking stuffed Duel Monsters he saw at gift shops. Instead, she was fast asleep, the tiniest of pleased little smiles curving the corners of her mouth.</p>
<p><em>Of course</em>.</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Is Anzu finally asleep, Big Brother?” Mokuba asked as soon as Seto re-entered the kitchen.</p>
<p>Seto gave an affirmative sort of grunt and pulled out a kitchen chair to sit in before he collapsed into his folded arms. After a moment, he looked up, realizing all the leftovers were gone.</p>
<p>“Thanks for taking care of the leftovers, Mokuba.”</p>
<p>Mokuba shrugged. “It’s the least I could do. I mean, they’re feeding us, giving us a place to stay….” He trailed off. He opened the fridge and gestured to three tall stacks of containers crammed with all the leftovers from breakfast. Seto nodded approvingly.</p>
<p>“Well.” Seto heaved a sigh. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”</p>
<p>“Are we going to go to work?” Mokuba asked. If the grimace on his face was any indication, he really didn’t care for the idea.</p>
<p>
  <em>“Promise me, Seto-kun!”</em>
</p>
<p>“...No.” He’d lost his cell phone in the fire along with everything else. Seto glanced around and spotted a cordless phone hung from the wall separating the kitchen from the living room. He headed toward it and removed it from the receiver. “We’ll work remotely.”</p>
<p>He hadn’t used his secret dial-in number in… what, nearly five years? Maybe more? It took him a moment to remember each of the digits. After a moment, it rang.</p>
<p>“...Kaiba Corporation,” a male voice answered, hesitating, “How may I direct your call?”</p>
<p>“Isono. It’s me.”</p>
<p>A crackling, shuffling sound came from the speaker.</p>
<p>
  <em>Did he drop his phone out of surprise or something?</em>
</p>
<p>Normally, Isono came across as unflappable. It was part of the reason why Seto had retained him, unlike much of the staff from Gozaburo’s days as President and CEO of Kaiba Corporation. Few people who worked for a defense contractor seemed keen on the idea of having a teenage boss, let alone one who insisted the company pivot to focusing on gaming technology and social causes. Isono, on the other hand….</p>
<p>“Seto-sama, I didn’t know where you and Mokuba-sama went after the fire. I’m glad to hear your voice.”</p>
<p>“With the mansion gone, a lot went with it. I’ll need you to get us our personal effects from the office. Any clothing, personal care items, laptops… that kind of thing.” Seto could feel a headache coming on just thinking about everything he and Mokuba would need just to feel a fraction closer to the “normal” they’d known for the past few years. At least he could count on Isono to think of the things that he couldn’t name.</p>
<p>“Yes, Seto-sama. Anything else?” Isono paused. “I noticed you calling from a different number, sir.”</p>
<p>“I’ll need a new cell phone, too,” Seto added, refusing to acknowledge Isono’s subtle inquiry. “Just get me something functional, I don’t care about the details.”</p>
<p>“Of course, sir. And… where should I have these items delivered, Seto-sama?”</p>
<p>Isono’s first veiled attempt at figuring out where he and Mokuba were staying had failed, so he’d resorted to the direct route. Then again, he would have to ask, one way or another, wouldn’t he?</p>
<p>
  <em>I don’t know why I care so much. It’s not like Isono will tell anyone.</em>
</p>
<p>A paragon of secrecy, Isono was one of the few people Seto trusted with handling the most sensitive of information within Kaiba Corporation. It was why the man accompanied him almost everywhere, and acted as the Master of Ceremonies during Battle City. It was why he’d been given a substantial raise after Dartz had bought out most of Kaiba Corporation’s stock, sending the company’s valuation into a tailspin. He hadn’t cared about who held the most stocks. Isono had stuck by his side. That mattered.</p>
<p>Seto cleared his throat.</p>
<p>“Mazaki.”</p>
<p>He hoped that would be enough of an answer, and that Isono could figure out what he was trying to say. For whatever reason, he couldn’t bring himself to tell Isono that he was staying over at his nemesis’ would-be girlfriend’s house after the Kaiba Mansion had burnt to a crisp.</p>
<p>Isono coughed, a not-too-subtle way of indicating that, no, he didn’t know what Seto was talking about. Before Seto could say anything though, Mokuba’s voice came through the line.</p>
<p>“Isono, you remember Anzu Mazaki? Her address should be in the database!” Mokuba walked into the kitchen, a second cordless phone from parts unknown pressed to the side of his face, his head tilted into one shoulder.</p>
<p>Seto glared at the mischievous grin spreading across his younger brother’s face. His brother just smiled more and plopped himself down on the nearby living room sofa.</p>
<p>After a moment, Isono responded. “Yes, Mokuba-sama, I found the address. I will ensure everything reaches you within the next hour and a half. Is there anything else, sir?”</p>
<p>Mokuba looked over his shoulder at Seto. “Anything you can think of, Big Brother?”</p>
<p>Seto paused, his gaze sweeping across the room. While it was far from his ideal workplace, it was serviceable: bright, with decently comfortable seating, and, judging by the blinking modem underneath a small table, ready access to the Internet.</p>
<p>It was more than he would normally expect, given the circumstances. He’d never voice those expectations aloud, however; at this point, everyone just assumed he demanded excellence. And he <em>did</em>, it was just that he demanded excellence so that people <b>could</b> be excellent. If he didn’t push people to their limits, they’d never take risks. Everything that Kaiba Corporation did, at some level, was risky. He needed people to constantly believe they could do more, become more, be greater.</p>
<p>If the people Seto surrounded himself with nearly everyday didn’t believe it, how could he?</p>
<p>“Isono, has the latest testing from the Electrics Division been completed?”</p>
<p>Another pause and a shuffling sound. “Ah… yes, sir. It looks like completion for all of the main projects was completed last week and is awaiting final approval before getting sent to the factories for scale production and marketing.”</p>
<p>“Hn. Have Electric bring one of the prototype dishwashers, too. You have the specifications available?”</p>
<p>Seto didn’t bother looking at what was almost assuredly a gawking stare from his younger brother across the room. He’d already heard the other line plunk from where it had probably fallen from Mokuba’s ear onto the sofa.</p>
<p>He rose from his seat at the kitchen table and leaned on the counter nearest the sink, where Anzu had spent much of the morning washing dishes until her fingers looked like dried fruit and her attention dissipated faster than a soap bubble. He stretched his arm across the countertop, stretching his fingers slightly until they reached the edge of the sink.</p>
<p>“The model’s no more than 61 centimeters wide, right?”</p>
<p>“Ah… correct, sir. The prototype of the standard model is exactly that width. We also have the compact and slimline models available too—”</p>
<p>“The standard will serve, Isono,” Seto interrupted him crisply. Better to get this all dealt with now so he could get more work done sooner rather than later.</p>
<p>“Very well, sir. Should I… arrange to have an installation technician come along with the unit?” Another one of Isono’s veiled questions-within-a-question. What could Seto Kaiba possibly want with a <b>dishwasher</b>? Seto had hoped it would be obvious, but he didn’t have the time or wherewithal to explain himself. What was he supposed to do, explain everything to Isono, starting from the thumping sound he’d heard from Anzu’s bedroom last night?</p>
<p>
  <em>Absolutely not.</em>
</p>
<p>He might trust the man with all sorts of personal information, but he had to draw the line somewhere.</p>
<p>“Yes,” Seto replied. “Just make sure they’re the most competent, quick, and… trustworthy technician we have.” The last thing he needed was some upstart installation engineer gossiping about where his boss was staying after the events of yesterday’s quake and subsequent fire.</p>
<p>“Understood, sir. I’ll get everything to you as soon as possible.”</p>
<p>“Good.” He was about to hang up the phone, but for some reason, the pleading expression on Anzu’s face came to mind. “...Thank you, Isono.”</p>
<p>“...Sir?”</p>
<p>“I’ll see you soon,” he added, and then Seto Kaiba hung up the phone.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Just over an hour into Anzu’s nap, she started to dream.</p>
<p>She dreamed about Gandora, the jeweled black dragon of destruction Yuugi used against Atem in their fateful duel. She saw herself reflected in the dragon’s blood-red gems, each mirrored version of herself different: one that looked crushed at Atem’s departure, tears streaming down her face; another that looked overjoyed, her face flushed and bright, her eyes only for her best friend. She saw an Anzu with her brows knit to the center of her forehead and her lips curved downward in a frown, an expression mirrored on Kaiba’s face in the hazy background.</p>
<p>Her dream self turned around, daring to look away from the Ceremonial Duel for a split second to see what Kaiba was so angry about when the earth burst beneath his feet, swallowing him. The pillars within the temple teetered and fell, stones arcing one after another.</p>
<p>Anzu screamed, but it didn’t matter: Honda fell next, a stone crushing a leg as he ran, hindering him just long enough to fall victim to a falling pillar. Then Bakura—poor Bakura, only recently freed from the manipulations of a dark being almost beyond understanding—a stone clipping the back of his head and staining his pale hair crimson.</p>
<p>The dirt and dust flying everywhere made it impossible to see, and before long, everything went dark.</p>
<p>Her limbs felt heavy, but not from anything crushing them. Rather, they felt heavy from within, as if the iron in her blood multiplied, weighing each vein down until there was no “Anzu” anymore, just a human-shaped bruise. The ground roiled again, a storm beneath her, and then she was ejected —no, spat— out of the quiet oblivion she’d only just accepted as her fate.</p>
<p>Anzu found herself <b><em>herself</em></b> again, her hands unbroken, unbruised, and curled into tendrils of damp grass and moist earth. Every joint in her body ached, but she managed to crane her neck to look at the sucking cold behind her: she’d just fallen out of a forgotten coffin, an unremarkable wooden box with no ornamentation on it at all.</p>
<p>“<em>Yuugi? Jounouchi?... Honda! Bakura</em>!” Anzu’s hoarse queries quickly turned into screaming cries.</p>
<p>
  <em>Alone.</em>
</p>
<p>Except… she heard crying, somewhere in the foggy distance. She fought the heaviness in her veins, rising to her feet and stumbling past headstone after headstone until she found the source of the heartbroken sounds: Mokuba, desperately trying to lift up one bar of a dark, shiny coffin.</p>
<p>Without a doubt in her mind, she knew who was inside.</p>
<p>
  <em>No!</em>
</p>
<p>Anzu tried to move toward Mokuba, but the fog had grown so thick it was like walking through water. The heaviness in her limbs multiplied, and she crumpled to her knees. She saw two familiar silhouettes, shadowed in the mist: Yuugi with his unmistakable hair, and Jounouchi beside him, hands casually stuffed into his pockets. Neither of them seemed to hear Mokuba, or if they did, they couldn’t be bothered to care.</p>
<p>
  <em>They’re not like that. Even if they never got along with Kaiba, they would never—</em>
</p>
<p>Except they <b>were </b>like that: ignorant and unfeeling. Yuugi and Jounouchi’s forms receded into the fog, even as Mokuba continued to struggle, trying to pick up his brother’s coffin entirely on his own. With each attempt, more of the coffin crumbled into black ash, each clump settling and mixing with the wet grass until it formed a textured shadow, one that undulated as if alive.</p>
<p>
  <b>
    <em>Yes! Accept your fate!</em>
  </b>
</p>
<p>Anzu didn’t recognize the voice; it was rumbling and low, hissing and quavering: a cacophony of unpleasant sounds somehow forming words. Goosebumps snaked down her arms and legs; everything felt so, so <em>cold</em>….</p>
<p>Again, the earth roiled, this time birthing a familiar, terrifying shape: that of the “High Priest of Darkness,” a rotting mummy clad in dark armor, threads of white hair still sprouting from the former human’s face and head. One eye seemed on the verge of popping out of his skill, coated in a thick sheen of blood, while the other…</p>
<p>
  <em>The Millennium Eye!</em>
</p>
<p>Anzu grabbed at the grass, desperately trying to find her footing. The corrupted priest –a mere flesh mask for a dark god– lurched toward her, recessed fingernails resembling claws ready to tear her to ribbons.</p>
<p>She couldn’t move. She couldn’t think, couldn’t breathe, couldn’t feel anything other than cold, crushing loneliness. She’d failed to save her friends, failed to help someone in need, failed, failed, <em>failed</em>, <b>failed, </b><b><em>failed!</em></b></p>
<p>Anzu awoke screaming.</p>
<hr/>
<p>Minutes before Isono’s scheduled arrival, Seto thought to change his clothes. While he trusted the man with a great deal, Isono had never seen Seto Kaiba in anything less than a button-down shirt and slacks, never mind a 20-year-old <b>gym</b> uniform (with a yeti drawn on it)!</p>
<p>Mokuba, on the other hand, couldn't be bothered. When Seto said he was going upstairs to change, his sibling simply shrugged at him. “I’m pretty comfortable, Big Brother. And it’s easier to get work done in this than in some sooty shirt from yesterday.”</p>
<p>
  <em>Well, he has a point.</em>
</p>
<p>He’d left the former site of the Kaiba Mansion with only the clothes on his back yesterday, and that meant his school uniform. In the chaos that followed the day’s earlier earthquakes, he simply hadn’t had time to get anything else. Luckily, Seto rarely wore his jacket open, so his collared shirt, at a minimum, was still clean, if a little smelly from all-day wear. It –and the accompanying slacks– would have to do.</p>
<p>As he headed back downstairs in his uniform shirt and slacks, he heard a faint whimper from Anzu’s room, the door of which Seto had left open a fraction. He glanced into the gap and saw her turn on her side in bed, but otherwise she seemed sound asleep.</p>
<p>Just before Isono rang the doorbell, Seto opened the door.</p>
<p>“Isono.”</p>
<p><em>You’re in the right place</em>.</p>
<p>Seto had spied him through the narrow window beside the door, glancing left and right on the thoroughly <b>normal</b> residential street, as if he was unsure that this address was actually the correct one.</p>
<p>The more curious thing was just why Anzu’s name had been in the Kaiba Corporation database—she wasn’t exactly a duelist, last Seto heard—but answering that question would have to come later. <b>Way</b> later.</p>
<p>“Ah, Seto-sama. I have what you requested, along with some other things…”</p>
<p>Seto stepped away from the doorway, welcoming Isono into a home that wasn’t his to welcome other people into. But if Anzu inherited any of her generosity from her parents, then he doubted that Mr. and Mrs. Mazaki would take issue with him handling some brief business affairs with someone Seto trusted implicitly.</p>
<p>Isono introduced him to the installation engineer, a wiry young man in a pair of clean, light blue Kaiba Corporation coveralls. The engineer had the prototype dishwasher—shrink-wrapped to the point where it was almost impossible to tell what it was—on a wooden pallet balanced atop a folding orange dolly he’d pulled from the Kaiba Corporation van parked in the driveway.</p>
<p>The badge fixed to his breast pocket read “K. Takahashi,” quite possibly the most generic name Seto could have thought of, but if Isono said he trusted the man, then so did Seto. When he reached the doorway with the dolly, Seto set out a small sigh of relief that Takahashi hadn’t attempted to cram the dolly –shrink-wrapped pallet and all– through the doorway. Instead, he brought out a box cutter to slice through most of the plastic, and then he carefully undid the remainder, one layer at a time, so as to not scratch the stainless steel exterior.</p>
<p>Once done, Takahashi shifted the prototype to the front of the pallet and the dolly at the edge of the doorway, and with a polite “Excuse me, sir,” accompanied by a nod of his head, Takahashi stepped inside, pulling fabric covers onto his shoes as he went. He slid the dishwasher off the pallet with a smooth <em>thump</em>, and looked to Seto for further instruction.</p>
<p>“We’ll put it in that cabinet, next to the sink. We’ll be removing the contents and the facing drawers, but I want to make sure we can replace any edging that needs to be cut.”</p>
<p>They discussed the installation a bit longer—it would take a few hours, at minimum, and would be somewhat noisy due to the use of a reciprocating saw—before Takahashi got to work and Isono stepped back to the doorway to speak with Seto.</p>
<p>“Sir, would you like me to look into five-star hotels which currently have a penthouse vacancy?”</p>
<p>
  <em>A question within a question.</em>
</p>
<p>Isono’s was one way to get ahead in business: get the information you wanted without being tactless about it. He wanted to know how long Seto and Mokuba intended to stay at the Mazaki home...and probably, if Seto was being honest with himself, <b>why</b> he was staying there in the first place.</p>
<p>No good answer came to mind. Not yet, anyway.</p>
<p><em>I blame it on the lack of sleep.</em> It wasn’t as if Seto Kaiba slept all that heavily on a regular basis anyway, but he knew he didn’t function at his peak performance unless he got a minimum of six hours, strung out between meetings, coding sessions, tests, school….</p>
<p>He’d tried to sleep last night, after that midnight conversation. And he must have, considering he didn’t recall hearing a single clatter to indicate someone was in the kitchen, outdoing the Bellagio when it came to breakfast options. He just didn’t remember when, amid the fog of thoughts about the mansion, and Mokuba, and Mazaki—‘Anzu,’ she’d told him, her voice a breathless whisper—he’d finally fallen asleep.</p>
<p>Isono wore sunglasses all the time, but Seto knew the man was looking at him, waiting expectantly for an answer.</p>
<p>
  <em>“Come with me. It’ll be better than trying to stay at some hotel that’s nowhere near school or work, right?”</em>
</p>
<p>“No, we’re fine for now, Isono. We have more pressing things to worry about. This should be enough to get us started.”</p>
<p>Isono glanced at Mokuba, who was leaning back on the couch, his lips pursed in a paltry imitation of a koi fish sucking crumbs off the surface of a pond. He shrugged at Isono, whose only response was to raise his eyebrows briefly before turning back to Seto.</p>
<p>“Sir.” He handed Seto a basic black flip phone with the Kaiba Corporation logo etched on it in silver. “I was unable to transfer your existing number to this line, but I set up forwarding with Telecommunications, so all calls to your old number should reach this phone for the time being. At your earliest convenience, you will need to contact the carrier to get a new SIM card…” he hesitated, “And probably a better model, sir. I wanted to get you a working device as soon as possible, so I didn’t think to—”</p>
<p>“Isono,” Seto interrupted. “It’s fine—”</p>
<p>He was about to say more, but a terrified scream interrupted his thoughts. He almost dropped the phone Isono handed him.</p>
<p>In the split second it took him to glance at the source of the sound—upstairs, from Anzu’s room, no doubt—Mokuba did something Seto had never seen him do before: he <em>vaulted</em> over the back of the couch and took off like a shot, up the stairs before Seto had time to do more than blink.</p>
<p>A breath later, Seto saw Isono staring at him wordlessly, both eyebrows raised. The engineer had dropped his measuring tape at the sound of the scream, but true to his professionalism, hadn’t said a word and quickly went back to work.</p>
<p><em>I shouldn’t leave Isono and Takahashi downstairs alone….</em> It wasn’t his home, wasn’t his place. But—</p>
<p>Seto set his jaw, angled his head at Isono, and then strode to the staircase just beyond the kitchen, resisting for a few precious seconds, the electric urge in his veins to run upstairs as fast as he could.</p>
<p>All of two minutes passed from the time Anzu screamed to the moment when Seto pushed her bedroom door all the way open, only to freeze a step inside at the sight of Anzu clinging to Mokuba, her whole body wracked with shuddering sobs.</p>
<p>“I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…” Anzu kept whispering, her voice hoarse, between gasping breaths. She didn’t even look up at Seto.</p>
<p>Mokuba, on the other hand, craned his head around, still awkwardly hugging Anzu as she kept crying into his shoulder from a sitting position in her bed.</p>
<p>“Big Brother, she just started— I don’t… w-what do I do?”</p>
<p>That was all it took for Seto to switch into automatic. He strode into the room and gently prised Anzu’s fingers from around Mokuba’s back, holding them in his own so his brother could wiggle his way away from the bed.</p>
<p>“Run downstairs and get her some water, will you, Mokuba?” Seto situated himself on the bed, shifting both of Anzu’s hands to one of his own.</p>
<p>
  <em>Since when were her hands so small?</em>
</p>
<p>Earlier she’d seemed frail, almost insubstantial. Now she seemed tiny, a wisp of light about to burn out. The electric tingle that had propelled him upstairs solidified into something firm, familiar, and solid.</p>
<p>It wasn’t until Seto heard the door squeak open that he realized Mokuba had yet to leave. Instead, his brother hesitated in the doorway, his eyes flickering from Anzu’s ashen face to her hands in Seto’s.</p>
<p>“Mokuba, the water—” Seto said under his breath.</p>
<p>
  <em>Now is </em>
  <b>
    <em>not</em>
  </b>
  <em> the time to be stubborn all of a sudden!</em>
</p>
<p>Mokuba’s brows knit in the center of his forehead. It was becoming a familiar expression on so many faces around Seto, these days.</p>
<p>“Are <b>you</b> going to be okay, Big Brother?”</p>
<p>Before Seto could come up with an answer to Mokuba’s bizarre question, Anzu’s hands shifted; she withdrew them from Seto’s grip and looked up, glassy-eyed. If the dark crescents under her eyes made her look like a raccoon earlier, now she looked like one of those exotic pets Mokuba had wanted once upon a time.</p>
<p>
  <em>What was it called, an axolotl? The pale thing with bulbous eyes and wild-looking stalks coming out of his head.</em>
</p>
<p>“Are you real?” Anzu murmured, her voice a thin, reedy rasp against the quiet.</p>
<p>Seto turned back to her, tempted to smooth out her mussed hair, the way he had for Mokuba for years before this, whenever his brother woke from a nightmare. He resisted, feeling that same electric tingle work its way through his fingertips. Again, the thought came to him: <em>It isn’t my place</em>.</p>
<p>Seto kept his gaze fixed on Anzu, even as he heard Mokuba finally slip out of the room.</p>
<p>“You tell me. What is it you call me?” Now that Mokuba was gone, maybe she’d say it. Maybe she’d remember and realize that whatever had frightened her had no basis in reality.</p>
<p>Anzu exhaled, the sound coming out like a soft chuckle. “It’s really you...Seto-kun.”</p>
<hr/>
<p>Mokuba didn’t often hesitate; he’d been through too many situations where those few split seconds meant the difference between comfort and chaos. But his brother had <b>no</b> experience dealing with scared girls, crying girls, or girls AT ALL. That <em>Anzu</em> was “that girl” made it especially difficult in Mokuba’s eyes; she was acting completely the opposite of how he’d always known her.</p>
<p>But then he heard her call his brother by his given name, something she’d never ever <b>ever</b> done before. Mokuba almost tripped in the doorway, but caught himself just in time by grabbing onto the frame.</p>
<p>Unsurprisingly, Seto had heard—or maybe even seen—the whole thing, and now he was gesturing at Mokuba with a flicking hand to get downstairs already. The look on his face was normally one reserved for researchers that annoyed him, usually by underestimating Seto’s comprehension of complicated subjects.</p>
<p>Mokuba winced and scuttled off downstairs to get Anzu a glass of water.</p>
<p>Once he got there, Isono still stood in the space between the living room and the kitchen, having hardly moved.</p>
<p>“Mokuba-sama.” Mokuba knew Isono’s mannerisms just as well as Seto; what sounded like a stated name, a formal greeting was, in Isono-speak, actually a veiled question: <em>What happened? Is everything all right? Is there anything I can do to help?</em></p>
<p>Isono had that much in common with Anzu, at least, Mokuba realized. Always wanting to help. But now <b>she</b> needed <b>his</b> help, and so Mokuba didn’t have time to explain things to Isono.</p>
<p>“Everything’s going to be okay, Isono. I think we’ve got everything we need for now. You should probably head back to HQ.” Mokuba nodded in the direction of the installation engineer, who was busy unscrewing pipes under the gutted countertop. “Do you have a way back while he’s at work?”</p>
<p>“Yes, Mokuba-sama, I contacted a company vehicle for pickup a few moments ago. Please don’t hesitate to let me know if you need anything else.”</p>
<p>Again, Mokuba hesitated. Isono could get <b>anything</b> to help out right now, but for some reason, the only thing he could think of was cheering Anzu up. But asking Isono to go get Anzu a box of chocolates or a bouquet of bright flowers seemed...weird. Maybe even wrong.</p>
<p>“Okay, we’ll call if we think of something.” Mokuba made his way to the sink—to where Anzu had almost sliced her hand open earlier, if it hadn’t been for his sharp-eyed brother—and filled up a clean glass with cold tap water.</p>
<p>He turned around to head upstairs, and nodded at Isono. “I’ll get the door after I come back downstairs.” Mokuba paused again, remembered something. It felt like it had been a lifetime ago, but it was within the past hour, wasn’t it? Hadn’t Seto uncharacteristically <b>thanked</b> Isono?</p>
<p>It wasn’t that Seto wasn’t polite; Mokuba remembered the unrelenting etiquette lessons Gozaburo had forced them both through. Seto just tended to show his gratefulness in… quieter ways.</p>
<p>“Thank you, Isono,” Mokuba said quickly, and then he dashed upstairs, water splashing against the rim of the cup as he went.</p>
<p>When he got back to Anzu’s room only a few minutes after he’d left, there was a marked change in Anzu’s disposition. She wasn’t quivering in place anymore, but her eyes still seemed glassy, framed in red from all that crying she’d done. She and Seto weren’t—<em>holding hands</em>—anymore, but it also didn’t look like they’d done much in the way of conversation, judging by their faces.</p>
<p>“Anzu, I brought you some water. Here.” Mokuba handed Anzu the glass, wincing as some water sloshed out of the cup when he thrust it at her faster than was strictly necessary. But Anzu didn’t seem to mind.</p>
<p>She smiled a small, tentative smile and took a sip. “Thank you, Mokuba-kun,” she said, her voice sounding far less hoarse than it had just a short while ago, when she’d said—</p>
<p>
  <em>“Are you real?”</em>
</p>
<p>She’d been looking at Seto when she said it. Those words were what seemed to snap her out of her crumbling state, back to a reality where she had nothing to <b>apologize</b> for.</p>
<p>There were a few more awkward moments of silence, as Mokuba and Seto both kept their gazes on Anzu while she sipped increasingly larger gulps of water until the cup was empty. She slurped the last dregs of water from the cup and then settled the cup in her lap. When she looked up, her face was a faint shade of pink, but she didn’t say anything.</p>
<p>“Mokuba,” Seto asked, breaking the silence and turning to look at his brother, “Could you go downstairs and finish checking on everything?”</p>
<p><em>He </em>wants<em> to be alone with Anzu?</em></p>
<p>Mokuba could hardly believe his ears. It wasn’t that he knew his brother had a problem with Anzu; probably the opposite, to be honest: she was probably one of the more tolerable members of Yuugi’s friend group, and since she’d help save him from some real pinches on more than one occasion. That Mokuba was never anything less than honest with Seto about those occasions had to have elevated her opinion in his brother’s book, at least a little bit.</p>
<p>That and… Mokuba really didn’t want to leave again. He wanted to understand why Anzu had clung to him like a lifeline, why she’d sobbed out apology after apology until Seto came in.</p>
<p>“Are you sure, Big Brother?” Mokuba didn’t move from his spot, less than a meter in front of Anzu’s bed. He was plenty close enough to just switch places with Seto, to keep her company for a bit while Seto went downstairs and took care of “checking on everything” to his own specifications. But Seto didn’t look like he was going to budge.</p>
<p>“Oh, and could you check the bin for the sleep aid bottle?”</p>
<p>A tacit refusal to answer his question was as good as an order. Lately, Mokuba had been testing the boundaries of those “orders,” and how much they really ought to apply to him, Seto’s brother, Seto’s only family, <b>and</b> Kaiba Corporation’s VP (in training). But what could he say to refuse now? ‘No, you go get it, I want to sit with Anzu?’ Mokuba could envision how well something like <b>that</b> would go.</p>
<p>“Okay,” he murmured, exiting Anzu’s bedroom with a deep sigh.</p>
<p>
  <em>I guess Seto’s trying to help her too...in his own weird way.</em>
</p>
<p>He would just have to trust that Seto could handle helping Anzu with nightmares the same way he’d helped Mokuba with his all those years ago.</p>
<p> </p>
<p>After Mokuba left a second time, pulling the door behind him as he went, the silence resumed. Anzu’s breathing finally steadied, but her cheeks and neck were still inexplicably rosy.</p>
<p>Seto was accustomed to long periods of silence; it was in that sort of environment that he’d been forced to study until nearly morning. Nowadays, he preferred the quiet hum of a server room, or the soft murmur and clinking of mugs at a coffee shop, where he could sit in the darkest corner with a lap, getting work done without being bothered. He couldn’t really remember the last time he’d worked from his office at Kaiba Corporation’s primary headquarters, let alone his former office at the Kaiba—no, Anzu was right: <em>Gozaburo</em> Kaiba’s—Mansion. Even classical music couldn’t melt away the oppressive feeling that overtook him in those spaces.</p>
<p>Anzu, on the other hand, seemed to fidget in silence, more used to classrooms filled with whispers and the sound of papers shuffling around, pens dropping to the linoleum floor—</p>
<p><em>Maybe after yesterday, that’s changed</em>.</p>
<p>After all, those sounds came before the earth convulsed and much of the school came raining down on them both.</p>
<p>“Bin?”</p>
<p>“Isono came over with a few things so we could work remotely,” Seto explained. It went without saying: <em>Because you asked me not to go anywhere without telling you.</em></p>
<p>He could have gotten around it—could have left her a note, or recorded a voice message or something—but he wasn’t that kind of person. Let Yuugi and his other friends think what they would, but Seto Kaiba did not break promises.</p>
<p>Seto conveniently failed to mention the dishwasher or the installation engineer. Instead, he changed the subject to what he saw as the more pertinent matter at hand.</p>
<p>“So. A nightmare.”</p>
<p>Even if he hadn’t walked in on Anzu crying her eyes out on his brother’s shoulder, he would have known that was the case; Anzu’s confession from last night, the profound disappointment of her rejection from Juilliard, and that terrifying <em>scream</em>: all of them clues to the obvious.</p>
<p>Seto Kaiba was no stranger to nightmares.</p>
<p>Anzu exhaled deeply through her nose, collapsing in on herself just a little bit more as she considered what to say.</p>
<p>“Several,” she admitted, her voice quiet but clear. “Some of them I’ve had before. A few bits were…” She remembered the High Priest of Darkness, his body made of slithering shadows, lunging toward her with rotting, clawed hands and a bloodied face. “...new.”</p>
<p>Seto leaned back from his half-on, half-off seated position, situating both of his hands behind his hips on the bed.</p>
<p>“It makes sense. You recently suffered a trauma—” Let her decide if he was talking about the earthquake or something else, “So it makes sense that your brain would try and process things while you sleep. If you complicate the process by not sleeping or running yourself ragged, well….” Seto trailed off meaningfully.</p>
<p>He leaned forward just a hair, noting how the pale pink of Anzu’s cheeks flared up again as she nearly rolled backward against her headboard in an effort to move away from him. Was she remembering earlier, perhaps?</p>
<p>Seto found himself staring at Anzu’s neck as she swallowed uncomfortably, blinking up at the ceiling as if she could see patterns in the drywall. He was surprised by the clarity in her eyes when she finally faced him again.</p>
<p>“Have you had nightmares? Since—” she cut herself off. Had she meant it as a single sentence? Had he had nightmares since...when? But the fact that Anzu started biting her lip, then licking it—<em>that tongue again</em>!—gave Seto pause.</p>
<p>
  <em>Is she talking about...him?</em>
</p>
<p>Or was there more to her question than she was letting on? It wouldn’t much of a surprise, really, if she knew about the <em>other</em> nightmares, the ones he’d had shortly after that first duel with who he now recognized as not-Yuugi. <b>Atem. </b>Maybe he’d told her himself, when they’d met up later. Maybe Jounouchi had something to do with it. For all his loudmouthed brashness, the mutt occasionally intuited something correctly, and it was only in those moments that Seto thought Jounouchi could do passably well as a pro duelist.</p>
<p>
  <em>Well. Regardless.</em>
</p>
<p>“No,” Seto answered honestly. “I haven’t had nightmares in a while. But…” Here his own gaze dropped from Anzu to his own hands, so much larger than Mokuba’s and even Anzu’s, but to Seto, still seeming so thin, so bony, so pathetic. These weren’t the hands of someone who could <em>save</em> anyone.</p>
<p>“No dreams, either.” Seto swallowed the acid lump in his throat. He was grateful when, a moment later, Mokuba returned, a small white bottle of over-the-counter sleep aid pills in his hands, along with a fresh cup of water. At least this time, Mokuba didn’t splash Anzu in his zeal to hand her the glass as soon as possible.</p>
<p>Instead, Mokuba kneeled slightly next to Anzu’s nightstand, reaching out for Anzu’s hand without the slightest bit of hesitation.</p>
<p>“Anzu, are you okay? Is there anything else I can bring you? Anything at all?”</p>
<p>Seto raised his eyebrows at the scene playing out before him: Mokuba, apparently trying to play the part of some fairy tale prince, quite intentionally ignoring Seto and doing his best to look after Anzu by doting on her in his youthful, clumsy way.</p>
<p><em>It’s not as if I have any more experience than he does</em>, Seto realized. The only person he’d ever “doted” on was Mokuba, and never with gestures quite like this. So where had Mokuba gotten it from?</p>
<p>Anzu smiled, a fluttering little twitch of her lips as she bobbed her head at Mokuba and took the water and the pill bottle from him. She placed both on her nightstand without drinking. “No, I’m okay. Thank you for… for being here right when I woke up, Mokuba-kun. I really appreciate it.”</p>
<p>“It’s no problem, Anzu,” Mokuba beamed back at her, but then he frowned. “You said ‘I’m sorry’ a lot… but what were you apologizing for?”</p>
<p>Seto nearly winced. Mokuba sometimes acted mature for his age, and sometimes his sense and tact were on par with a bulldozer.</p>
<p>Anzu’s gaze drifted again, focusing on some unseen point in the distance. “For not helping you when I should have,” she said quietly. Seto noticed her fingers clenching the comforter until her knuckles turned white.</p>
<p>Mokuba looked at his brother, confused by Anzu’s reply, but Seto only shrugged slightly. A breath later, Anzu looked back at them and smiled again, but it was still a tired, weak little smile that didn’t come close to meeting her eyes.</p>
<p>“It was just a nightmare, though. You know I’ll always help you no matter what, right Mokuba?”</p>
<p>“...Yeah,” Mokuba agreed, but judging by the vexed expression on his face, Seto wasn’t alone in thinking Anzu’s answer was far from satisfactory. “You always have helped, Anzu…. But, let me—let <em>us</em>, I mean— help you too, okay?”</p>
<p>Anzu only bobbed her head in response, a wordless agreement to an undefined promise. She shifted in her bed again, and Mokuba made to leave the room, likely assuming that Anzu wanted to get back to sleep. Seto, on the other hand, stayed seated on the bed, as if waiting for Anzu to give <b>him</b> the answers he wanted, whether he had to wait one minute or one hour.</p>
<p>Mokuba sighed as he sluggishly made his way to Anzu’s bedroom door, dragging his feet to prove a point. Once in the doorway, he turned around and frowned openly at his brother, but Seto ignored his pointed stare and stayed where he was, waiting until the sound of Mokuba’s footfalls receded downstairs once more.</p>
<hr/>
<p>“Mokuba was in your nightmare?”</p>
<p>Anzu didn’t expect that question. She didn’t know <b>what</b> to expect from Seto Kaiba, sitting here in her bedroom like he belonged there.</p>
<p><em>Like it’s </em>our<em> bed and not just mine!</em></p>
<p>Anzu wanted to shake the thought out of her head, embarrassed that she was remembering her accidental suggestive turn of phrase last night. She kept alternating between hot and cold, flushed and pale. No wonder why she was so exhausted, her blood was racing from one end of her to the other every few moments she was around Seto Kaiba!</p>
<p>
  <em>Focus, focus!</em>
</p>
<p>Maybe she did owe him some sort of an explanation. It didn’t have to be everything, not all of the gruesome details. Maybe not mentioning the undead specter of his previous incarnation’s father-turned-evil-high-priest was a wise decision.</p>
<p>“I...Yeah. There was a lot of death. And a funeral. Mokuba was crying, but I couldn’t get to him, and—” But the more she tried to be perfunctory about it, the louder the nightmare became in her head, where it dwelled still, separated from Anzu’s everyday reality by only the thin bone of her skull.</p>
<p>“It was like being back there, in that… that <b>tomb</b>,” Anzu spat the last word out, like an unpleasant piece of gristle on her dinner plate. “Everything started falling apart, and people were getting hit or swallowed by the earth, and y-you —” she started to stutter, feeling the whispers turn into screeches, the sound of metal squealing next to her and earth roiling beneath.</p>
<p><em>You were the first to die, and I couldn’t do anything. I failed, I </em>failed, <em>I </em><b><em>failed</em></b><em>!</em></p>
<p>“Hey.” Anzu found herself looking up at Seto, and he was far closer to her now than he’d been just a moment before, on the other end of her bed, with one leg dangling off the side. Right here, right now, he sat less than an arm’s length away, one hand holding her chin up so she could face him directly instead of squeezing her blanket as if it could actually offer her any sort of <em>comfort</em>.</p>
<p>She took one breath.</p>
<p>Then another. She closed her eyes between one inhale and exhale, and in that time, Seto released her chin from his surprisingly gentle grip.</p>
<p>
  <em>He’s… not going to tell me I’m being foolish? That I should stop dwelling on the past and let things beyond my control affect me?</em>
</p>
<p>For some reason, Anzu couldn’t comprehend what was happening: Seto reached past her, his arm brushing her shoulder with an startling jolt of warmth. He wasn’t reaching for her, to brush aside her undoubtedly sloppy hair or to grip her shoulders. Instead, he grabbed the pill bottle Mokuba had set on the nightstand, gripping it in one hand while he worked the cap off in a sharp twist. He tapped out two oblong blue pills onto one hand, folding them into his palm while he fixed the bottle shut once more and set it back on the nightstand.</p>
<p>Then Seto reached for her hand. The whispering, hissing, screeching darkness that started to invade the corners of Anzu’s vision receded, and there was only the rosy haze before her: his long fingers prying her hand open so he could press the pills into them; his arm brushing against her shoulder again, the warmth turned into a sizzling sensation that danced down her elbow all the way to her fingertips.</p>
<p>
  <em>Am I going crazy? Have I been dreaming this whole time?</em>
</p>
<p>Maybe she was getting sick. After all, how else to explain <b>Seto Kaiba</b> in her bedroom, leaning casually on her bed? How to explain the strange feeling when he casually brushed against her in his effort to grab the glass of water Mokuba had brought upstairs only a minute or so ago?</p>
<p>“Get some sleep,” Seto said at last. He started to rise to his feet, but he didn’t leave: not until Anzu looked at him, down at the pills in one hand and the cup in the other, and back up at him. He wouldn’t leave until she’d swallowed the pills and every last milliliter of the water.</p>
<p>“But—” Could you go back to sleep if you were already dreaming? Or was this simply a new, twisted layer to the nightmare she’d been having all along? If she reached out for Seto again, would he crumble into ash?</p>
<p>“No. No buts. If you don’t get some sleep for yourself, then… get some sleep so your parents don’t come home and freak out about you looking like a raccoon or something. And if that’s not reason enough, then…” He looked at the door, maybe sensing something Anzu couldn’t.</p>
<p>“...If not for them, then for Mokuba,” Seto managed, his own voice beginning to sound hoarse.</p>
<p>
  <em>Not for you?</em>
</p>
<p>He’d never say it. Hell, <b>she’d</b> never say it.</p>
<p>“You saw how worried he was about you,” Seto continued. He frowned, perhaps wanting to say more, but no words came.</p>
<p>“How am I supposed to sleep after a nightmare like that, though?” Anzu asked quietly. “I just...I would rather stay awake for a bit longer, wait until I don’t have another choice—”</p>
<p>“You don’t have another choice,” Seto stated bluntly. “One hour isn’t enough sleep for anybody, not even me. You nearly sliced your hand open and could have done serious damage, and I doubt you would have wanted your parents coming home to a sink filled with blood and their daughter laid up in a hospital with stitches in your hand, would you?”</p>
<p>“...You have a point,” Anzu admitted, almost under her breath. It wasn’t often that Seto Kaiba got the best of her. Hadn’t it been their little routine, for her to render him speechless and him to imply that they’d meet on the verbal battlefield again someday?</p>
<p>
  <em>Well. Maybe that was just my idea of it, at any rate.</em>
</p>
<p>After all, since...since <b>Egypt</b>, there hadn’t been any dramatic encounters like that. In fact, they’d had more moments of quiet agreement as lab partners than they’d ever had verbal standoffs, much to the consternation of Jounouchi, who didn’t understand why Anzu hadn’t loudly complained to the teacher about her lab partner assignment. In truth, working with Seto Kaiba in science class wasn’t that bad. It was certainly more pleasant than working with Jounouchi. At least Yuugi could somehow cool Jounouchi’s louder meltdowns into something a <b>little</b> less likely to get them both detention.</p>
<p>“Of course I do,” Seto responded, rolling his eyes. “Look, if you’re worried about nightmares—” He strode back to her side, and before Anzu could blink, his hands were on hers, opening the tight fist she’d made around the twin pills she had yet to swallow. Somehow it still felt like she already <em>had</em>, though, with the way her throat constricted at how close he was all over again.</p>
<p>“They’re the only thing that have helped me sleep when I...when I wouldn’t be able to sleep otherwise,” Seto said quietly.</p>
<p><em>This</em> Anzu understood, even without the words Seto had so plainly omitted from his confession: <em>You’re not the only one who gets anxious, who wishes your brain didn’t go to such dark places when you get stressed or upset. I might not get nightmares that often anymore, but when I do...they’re just like yours.</em></p>
<p>But maybe she was reading too much into the look in his eyes, that frank, pointed stare of his. Flowers probably wilted under the burning intensity of his gaze.</p>
<p>“All right,” Anzu agreed with Seto—again! How many times was this, in a single hour? “But I have some conditions.”</p>
<p>At this, Seto raised an eyebrow and crossed his arms over his chest, an unspoken gesture of challenge. He’d probably laugh at how simple her requests were.</p>
<p>“One, no leaving the house without telling me. And notes or voice messages don’t count,” she said, ticking items off on her fingers. This was just a repeat of what she’d asked him to promise earlier, so he shouldn’t have a problem with it—but why did Seto look so surprised? Both of his eyebrows were raised, and he blinked several times, as if he wasn’t quite sure <b>who</b> was the one who’d been dreaming.</p>
<p>“Two, you should probably leave one of the cordless phones in here, in case my parents call.” She didn’t want to consider the possibility that <b>Yuugi</b> might call, and there’d be no way she could possibly explain why either Seto or Mokuba Kaiba would be answering her home phone.</p>
<p>Anzu raised her ring finger to make a third point, but before she could articulate it, a loud buzzing noise interrupted her.</p>
<p>“What. Was. That?”</p>
<p>Seto opened his mouth to explain, glancing out of the side of his eye as if someone as stupidly tall and imposing as him could affect a nonchalant pose.</p>
<p>“<b>Why </b>is there someone<b> chainsawing something </b>in my<b> house</b>?!” Anzu bolted up from her bed, her eyes wide. The dark red shadows masking her face almost seemed invisible now, under the stark white and brilliant blue of her eyes.</p>
<p>She tossed aside her comforter and looked wildly around her room, casting her gaze about for some proper clothes she could throw on.</p>
<p>“It’s just a simple installation—” Seto began, but Anzu refused to hear it. She spied a clean t-shirt draped over her bedroom chair and a pair of fitness pants sticking out of the gap in her closet door and made a beeline for them. Once they were in hand, Anzu pressed her hand against Seto’s chest, somehow able to ignore the pulsing heat and the surprising definition apparent under his regulation collared shirt for school.</p>
<p>“Out, out, out!” Anzu shoved Seto into the hall before pulling her door shut with a <em>bang!</em></p>
<hr/>
<p><em>Well this is going just </em>swimmingly<em>!</em> Seto thought. But maybe once Anzu saw that the noise was ultimately to her own benefit, she wouldn’t try and turn him into one of her octopus sausages?</p>
<p>It was a small hope, at least.</p>
<p>Less than two minutes after Anzu pushed him out of her bedroom, she emerged again, this time dressed in a light cotton t-shirt—<em>without a bra on underneath</em>, Seto realized, his whole face heating up—and a pair of drawstring track pants hung loosely from her hips.</p>
<p>“It’s louder than it is messy,” Seto tried to explain, but Anzu, previously so adorably squeamish about being in close physical proximity to him, just pushed him by the shoulder so she could squeeze past him down the hall to the staircase.</p>
<p>“It’s actually a lot less messy than your cooking,” he began again, but he realized his error when Anzu looked over her shoulder and <b>glared</b> at him.</p>
<p>
  <em>That’s an expression I haven’t seen on her face in a while.</em>
</p>
<p>And yet… it was almost nostalgic, wasn’t it? Maybe not this situation—he’d certainly never personally been on the receiving end of a fierce glare for installing state-of-the-art technology as a present before—but certainly the look on her face, all because of him.</p>
<p>Was it wrong to be a little proud of that?</p>
<p>“I don’t mean your cooking in general, I just meant this morning, with all the dishes, so I thought that—”</p>
<p>Anzu charged down the last few steps and power walked to the kitchen entryway, stopping in her tracks when she caught sight of the installation technician. Seto hadn’t expected her to stop so abruptly, and just like he had with Mokuba earlier in the day, he collided with her backside.</p>
<p>The installation engineer had stopped sawing and was now shifting the new dishwasher off its pallet onto the kitchen floor with cautious steps, not leaving so much as a streak anywhere.</p>
<p>“Excuse me, miss,” Takahashi bowed his head deferentially toward Seto and Anzu. If he noticed her gawking at him, he didn’t indicate it in the slightest.</p>
<p>“No, excuse me,” Anzu replied in an automatic monotone. Her eyes cast about the kitchen, noting the former drawers stacked in a neat pile off to the side of the kitchen, their metal runners and accompanying screws lining the kitchen table. The contents of those drawers were either moved out of sight or sticking out of a few choice containers on the far counter: an assemblage of ladles and straining spoons here, a set of tea strainers there.</p>
<p>“You got us a dishwasher,” she said finally. It was a statement and not a question, and yet somehow Seto still felt she was <b>demanding </b>something more.</p>
<p>“Yes?” He didn’t normally answer statements with questions. Seto Kaiba didn’t <b>normally</b> respond to demands at all! But this was different.</p>
<p>Anzu’s chin dropped to her chest, and because he was behind her, Seto couldn’t tell if she was furious or overjoyed. He gingerly took a step back and around so he was facing Anzu, and when she raised her head, he was surprised to see her smiling radiantly at him, a wide, genuine smile that almost made the dark circles under her eyes disappear for good.</p>
<p><em>The key word being </em>‘almost<em>.</em>’</p>
<p>Anzu started laughing under her breath and she shook her head a few times, this time out of apparent disbelief rather than the urge to fling bad thoughts from her head.</p>
<p>“I’m not sure whether to kiss you or kill you,” Anzu began, and here Seto knew—he just <b>knew</b>—his neck and ears had gone bright red, if not the entirety of his face. Judging by Mokuba’s snort of a laugh, it was probably the latter.</p>
<p>“But if I don’t kill you,” Anzu continued, “my mom just might.” Then she laughed, a clear, jubilant sound, and she stepped fully in the kitchen to inspect what the engineer had already accomplished.</p>
<p>Isono certainly knew how to pick the right people for a job, Seto knew. Takahashi had done more in a handful of minutes than most people could accomplish in hours, judging by how close everything looked to being ready to go. Then again, Seto had never installed a dishwasher in his life, so it was possible they were still hours away from Anzu never again coming close to giving herself permanent nerve damage.</p>
<p>“So all the stuff from the drawers is around here?” she asked, glancing around the kitchen.</p>
<p>“I moved a few things around,” Mokuba piped up from the couch. “I hope that’s okay. Some of the pots and pans stacked pretty well in one of the other cabinets, and I was able to put most of the tea stuff in with the actual tea.”</p>
<p>“Yes, it’s okay, thank you, Mokuba-kun,” Anzu said for the second time that morning. Everything about her was different from then and now; minutes before, she’d seemed ghost-like, whispering and pale. Now she was brilliant, practically twirling around the kitchen table as she noted where the dish towels had been moved to, where the aluminum foil and parchment paper could be found.</p>
<p>
  <em>This is the Anzu I know.</em>
</p>
<p>Seto hadn’t been trying to get her back; he hadn’t really known she was “gone,” per se, not until she’d startled him out of his conversation with Isono with that scream of hers.</p>
<p>
  <em>Speaking of which….</em>
</p>
<p>“Isono headed back to HQ,” Mokuba explained off Seto’s inquisitive glance. “He got another company car to pick him up, but he said he’ll be available whenever if we need anything else.”</p>
<p>Anzu’s gaze fell on the haphazard workstation Seto and Mokuba had set up on one side of the kitchen table.</p>
<p>“If it’s going to be noisy for a while down here, you guys are welcome to use the desk in the guest bedroom. The Internet works up there, too. I mean, I know it’s no Kaiba Corporation headquarters or anything, but...” she trailed off, her brows furrowing.</p>
<p>Hedging a bet, Seto dared to place a hand on Anzu’s shoulder. His bet paid off when she glanced up at him with a tentative smile. “It’s fine.”</p>
<p>“So… what’ll happen to the drawers? And the other parts of the cabinet that had to be cut away?” Anzu asked. “If Mom and Dad come home to this, they’re not necessarily going to care about the dishwasher, they’re just going to take one look at the mess and…” Anzu trailed off.</p>
<p>One look on her face and Seto knew her anxieties were creeping up on her again. That they’d been on the same wavelength so many times previous meant he could probably hazard a guess at what they were, too: <em>angry parents, worried parents, parents that would kick them out, where would they go? Parents in general, mentioning parents, should or shouldn’t mention parents around them, rude or cruel or just normal?</em></p>
<p>But before Anzu could get lost in her concerns about Mr. and Mrs. Mazaki reacting badly to a new appliance, Mokuba spoke up again. “Takahashi here only cut into areas that he’s going to throw out, or that we can patch up or replace easily,” he explained. Mokuba lifted up one of the drawers, revealing a small barcode sticker affixed to the bottom.</p>
<p>“See? We already scanned them and if anything does happen, we know where to get new parts really fast.”</p>
<p>“We’re Kaiba Corporation,” Mokuba added, perhaps a bit smugly. “We can do anything.”</p>
<p>Anzu looked around as if seeing the kitchen again for the first time. Though it had only been a little over an hour since she’d been elbow-deep in the once-foamy sink water, the kitchen surely looked like a completely different place to her now, with all the food packed away and a new appliance just waiting to be installed.</p>
<p>“It seems that way,” Anzu dragged a finger along the top of the new dishwasher, her eyes far too glassy to be reading the fine print on each button.</p>
<p>“Let’s get you back upstairs,” Seto murmured into her ear. He’d said it under his breath so as to not draw the technician’s attention—or Mokuba’s, for that matter—but he hadn’t expected Anzu to start and practically jump into the air.</p>
<p>“Oh! Oh yes, that’s… that’s a good idea.” Again Anzu took the lead, but her steps were slower now, more measured. Seto tried not to notice how her track pants moved ever-so-slightly up and down her hips with each step.</p>
<p>Once back in her brightly colored bedroom, Anzu made a beeline for the blue pills and the glass of water on her nightstand, and chugged them down in three swallows.</p>
<p>“Happy now?” she asked Seto, gesturing at him with her empty cup.</p>
<p>“Yes,” he answered honestly. He could feel the beginnings of a smile curving his lips, but he didn’t know if Anzu noticed. She’d started to climb back into bed, heedless of her current un-pajama-like attire.</p>
<p>“Now,” Seto chose not to think about it and strode over to the window. He yanked the curtains shut, enveloping the room in a muted darkness tempered only by the light filtering in from the hallway. “Go to sleep.”</p>
<p>Seto didn’t dare comment on Anzu’s new choice of sleepwear, lest he call attention to the fact that he’d been paying close attention to what she was wearing in the first place. It wasn’t like <b>he</b> cared what she wore to bed.</p>
<p>
  <em>She can do what she wants!</em>
</p>
<p>“I-I’ll close the door so you don’t get disturbed by any further noise,” he told her, gripping the doorknob perhaps a little bit tighter than strictly necessary.</p>
<p>He was about to shut the door completely when he heard Anzu’s soft voice drifting toward him.</p>
<p>“Thank you… Seto.”</p>
<p>He shut the door with a click and smiled.</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>The earthquake in this story is inspired by the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake, which devastated a lot of Japan, specifically the northeastern part of the main island, Honshu.<br/>I’ve usually treated Domino like it’s a suburb or prefecture of Tokyo, or within an hour or two of Tokyo (even though we only ever see Honda and Shizuka take the bullet train, and I don’t think we’ve ever seen iconic Tokyo buildings as if they’re part of the Domino skyline). While the quake was almost 400 kilometers from Tokyo, it still had an impact on essential services, with trains and other utilities shut down for safety.</p><p>If we imagine that Domino is less a suburb of Tokyo and more a small city within a few hours of travel, especially if it’s in a northern, eastern, or northeasterly direction, then it would make sense that there’d be many buildings that remained standing, while others collapsed in on themselves, caught fire, or flooded. Streets would still experience large-scale cracks or even liquefaction, and there would be some neighborhoods that survived mostly unscathed, while others would be devastated.</p><p>While I’d be lying if I didn’t say this was an excuse for Innocent Cohabitation and (according to my husband, anyway) an inverse of the situation in What Doesn’t Kill You with You Can’t Go Home Again, you know my style by now, right? Realistic drama mixed in with angst from the utter weird magicalness that is Yu-Gi-Oh!</p><p>Stay tuned for more… eventually. I’m just going all out of order here. I’m thinking I’ll circle back to Mayonaka no Rendezvous for another chapter after this, then we’ll see where my newfound creative motivation takes me. Thanks for reading, and don’t hesitate to comment: constructive criticism, praise, or even OH HELLO is welcome and appreciated.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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